cheese it, the cops!

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

For Standpoint I recapitulated my ridicule of Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews, 

masculinity, psychology, and servility

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

some piecey blog entries: how thoreau became a radical, ragging mr. rogers, 'ok boomer' and the fiction of generations, mao meets macklemore, quotations from chairman joe, masculinity, psychology, and servility, i just can't get no reception, the washington post opinion page and the cia: no distance, nicholas sandmann and nathan phillips (remember them?) both did well, homo economicus replaced by saints

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

2018 sartwelliana

recent items

 

wsj: are rural conservatives voting against their own interests? [pdf]

splicetoday: elizabeth warren lost the debate.

resounding: augustus pablo's rasta hymnody

 

previous resoundings: ann peebles, blue angel (cyndi lauper), the kendalls, the bellamy brothers

as biden and sanders fade, trump removal is urgent

2020 is going to make 2016 look like an innocent time

free speech: a visceral defense

nostalgia for automobile

the highwomen redeem america (or at least americana)

op-ed as advertising

 

 

 

 

 

recent splicetoday things:

 

apologizing for whiteness is not the worst idea

resounding: the bellamy brothers (first of a series, reaching back and re-appreciating)

mass shootings as a kind of nihilism (perhaps ideology and, like, social media, are not the problem)

go ahead and have babies if you want (prediction, in 30 years the world will still be beautiful)

how to write an executive order on free speech (a new title ix)

hunting the ultimate game (on campus and congress)

 

 

 

sartwelliana, 2018

Some of my writing this year, especially for splicetoday:

Music: on my stereo and in  my head, a lot of the year was occupied by classic gospel, say 1940-80; gospel music as women's liberation, 80th birthday tribute to the great Shirley Caesar, country enters its postmodern era (2018 top ten),  hippie goddesses of the 1970s (Bonnie Raitt, Maria Muldaur, Linda Ronstadt, Tracy Nelson), stoner country (Commander Cody, Asleep at the Wheel, NRPS), Chrissie Hynde, best pop artist of the last 40 years, happy birthday, 'stand by your man'.

For whatever reason I didn't do a shitload of humor this year, but I did pen a stirring tribute to Philip Roth's obituarists. I tried to rehabilitate my tarnished brand with an apology to America.

I tried to sketch out my basic politics in a triptych: why i am not a leftist, why I'm not on the right, why i am an anti-authoritarian. 

Attacks on pc, identity politics, representation etc.: the dead end of demographic politics (wsj), dna and politics, kanye west and susan collins: shredded by intersectionality, "looks like me", 'researcher' announces stunning result: we're all the same, King meets Zuckerberg, pc entertainment as medieval allegory, bad words, the punditry of personal destruction, self-esteem and bauxite, Anna Deavere Smith and the ridiculous reception of Black Panther

Gender: conversion therapy isn't the cure for toxic masculinity (wsj), boys, we will survive, we old dudes should mistrust ourselves, holidays and gender

'Why They Suck" is winding down, but I got to michelangelo, harry potter, bill gates, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Serra.

Religion and spirituality: (see gospel music stuff, above), beckoning god from his fastness, i advocate the doctrine of original sin (nytimes), priestly abuse is central to catholicism .

Personal/philosophical excursions: fall in the south mountain fruit belt, weekend dad, a very short memoir, how to be original, how much distance?, review of james c. scott 'against the grain', george lakoff and the pseudo-science of neuropropaganda (wsj)

Politics, Trump, and so on: perjury factory, fuck me, i'm going to vote democrat tomorrow, apocalypse in the theatrocracy, re-narrating american history is an old persuasive tactic, american institutions have earned our distrust (wsj), two (or three) kinds of dishonesty, slavery, immigration, and civil disobedience, grooving on the world order in danger, america's intelligence coup, the domestic threat to american elections, american politics is filthy, polarization and the counter-factual crisis, how to argue with a young socialist (wsj), i want donald trump to hold me while i cry, politics and geography, children: our treasures our targets, trump and brexit as repudiations of technocracy

How Would You Draw History?

recent items

NYTimes: How Would You Draw History?

SpliceToday: How Much Distance?

Why They Suck: Richard Serra, Tear Down This Wall

(and the why they suck hall of fame)

Fuck Me, I'm Going to Vote Democrat Tomorrow

America, There is Hope (for Country Music)

  

recent items

splicetoday:

okay. for real. i'll shut up now. (on old men and #metoo)

stoner country (new riders of the purple sage, asleep at the wheel, grateful dead, commander cody)

apocalypse in the theatrocracry

the fight for the soul of america (mccain, etc)

country needs women (sister sadie, the great all-female bluegrass band)

 

wall street journal: how to argue with a young socialist (on google drive)

 

 

recent items

splicetoday: gospel music as liberation, how strong women made it from bessie smith to janis joplin

the great nathaniel peabody rogers on how to write, unpublished since 1842

why they suck: w.e.b. dubois

reality and representation: martin luther king on facebook

pc entertainment as medieval allegory

nonsense demography

Hillary and Tammy: Soul Sisters in the Het Era

If you've read this blog over the years, you know of my love of Tammy Wynette. Here's a tribute in SpliceToday, on the occasion of the 50th birthday of "Stand By Your Man." It's anything but an anthem of female submission, actually, and she had even wilder and more problematic genderish lyrics, like this astounding thing: 

However you're reading the gender politics, her early recordings are the best in the history of country music.

best country albums 2017

gifted: my country top ten for 2017. i've been doing this with occasinal gaps since 1982: a few years for the military mag off duty, for one. one thing about country music, i say, is that you can't be a charlatan; you've pretty much got to be able to sit there with a guitar and kill. some demonstrations of that by people in the top ten:

janson comes in at #2.

 

about as good a pure singer as you will ever hear:

there are a bunch of good songs on her album, which pops in at 5. i like "sway" and "potential," e.g.

 

a thousand horses deserves more play than they're getting (#7):

 

and i'm recommending everyone to check out song suffragettes for stuff like this (#10):

 

 

some of my music writing this year for #splicetoday:

the golden age of underground hip hop

king of country

best of the j. geils band

bluegrass gospel: devotion, virtuosity, and beauty

beat the meetles

 

 

don't hate my grind

splicetoday this week: the golden age of underground hip hop. 

 

it was a utopian era in some ways. in part it's what happens when you don't police racial borders in art; the playlist (which i really think rocks) is about a third white a third black a third latino and all hybrid.

This playlist is the tip of an Iceberg.

—7l and Esoteric (Boston), “Operating Correctly”

—Aceyalone (LA), “Cornbread”

—Atmosphere (Minneapolis), “God Loves Ugly,” “Scapegoat,” “Perfect”

—Awkwafina (Brooklyn), “My Vag” (outside temporal parameters, but don’t miss it)

—Bahamadia (Philadelphia), “Special Forces”

—Beatnuts (Queens), “Se Acabo”

—Brother Ali (Minneapolis), “Three Day Journey,” “Prince Charming,” “Ali Boombaye”

—Cool Calm Pete (Seoul/Queens), “Cloudy”

—Dead Prez (NYC), “Don’t Hate My Grind,” “Police State”

—Delinquent Habits (LA), “Here Come the Horns”

—Demigodz (Connecticut), “Captivate/Deactivate”

—Immortal Technique (Lima/Harlem), “Harlem Streets,” “Freedom of Speech,” “Peruvian Cocaine,” “Golpe de Estado,” “Payback”

—J-Live (Brooklyn), “Not Satisfied”

—Jedi Mind Tricks (Philadelphia), “Heavenly Divine,” “Uncommon Valor: A Vietnam Story,” “Trinity”

—Murs (LA), “Murs Rules the World”

—Sage Francis (Boston), “Makeshift Patriot,” “Narcissist,” “Take it Back” (Non-Prophets)

—Self-Scientific (LA), “Three Kings,” “Return”

—Necro feat. Vinnie Paz and Immortal Technique, ” Take Hip Hop Back” (a sort of retrospective of the movement)

 

 

April may be the cruelest month, but October is a bitch...

 

 

Man. Woman. Nature. History. Art. Birth. Death. Infinity. Three chords and Truth.

https://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/10/09/dispatches-from-wolf-country-old-age-should-rage/

 

 

my splicecolumn this week declares brad paisley to be the king of country music. really, seriously, the man can play. just a couple of examples of range on the guitar:

 

 

 

 

 

zz

watcha listenin to, crispy? zz ward's new album the storm. she will sell millions, or at any rate she ought to.

 

(that fantastic negrito is fantastic.) alright, first off, i love the genre location: i'd call it roots pop. there are all sorts of trad elements, including soul, blues, early hip hop, perhaps just a touch of country here and there. this is how i think popular music should develop, venerating the tradition and using it, but also pushing it forward, so it sounds like now. i'd compare zz's approach to, say, robert cray in the '80s: oh that is definitely the soul blues, and that is definitely right now too, and it sounds great on the radio. there are all kinds of contemporary production touches on the album, and they are not at all in tension with the songs or the voice: the stuff sounds great.

zz is about the singingest motherfucker you ever heard, and to some extent she emulates adele's approach: big love and heartbreak songs, showstopping voice. i love the timbre, which can be rough or smooth, flying or growling. her first album when the casket drops, is also wonderful.

 

i'd say the new album is a bit more commercial, and also the lyrics are less interesting (here we've got 'you better do it like it's 25 to life'), which is part of the headed-to-platinum approach. i've got no objection to commercial, however, and i say she should just go right on and you should buy her albums. that makes sense, because she has yet to record a clunker.

 

 

my man brad paisley

no one who listens to country music can have missed brad paisley, but i'm afraid i didn't focus adequately. i'm just now listening through the whole body of work: ten albums or so, of remarkably consistent excellence. what a fine singer and what a great songwriter: he has added wonderful and hilarious and traditional and moving songs to the permanent country repertoire, if you ask me. i swear if you were making your list - hank, george, johnny, conway, alan jackson, randy travis, etc - and you fetched up on paisley (going on to stapleton, maybe), that would be perfectly sensible. and you can believe me or not, but he is one of the most wildly excellent guitar players who has ever played in any genre. almost uniquely among actual country stars, he did an album of instrumentals ("play," 2008). he can play anything, and even on a hit country song he might roll through some jazz riffs, or hit the blues nice and hard and juicy, as it were. right he can play unbelievably fast, but it's always coherent, smart as shit too. i mean try a low-key apparent throwaway like this:

 

 

on the other hand try this tribute to dick dale:

 

here are a couple of favorites, drawn from this great big songbag.

 

this is from his fine recent album love and war.

 

there are really very many classic original traditional country songs.

 

then there's this. he's definitely a performer and a charmer, and very hilarious on gender ("you need a man around here"). enjoy that, but don't let it distract you from the surpassing musical excellence.

 

splice today column this week is a longer tribute to the j. geils band, including 20-song list. (here is the frigging 50-cut version.)

 

 

J. Geils is gone. When I tell people that the J. Geils band was my favorite rock act of the '70s, they are somewhat puzzled. And every obit describes them as the band who did 'Centerfold,' indeed their biggest hit by a way. But by the time they got there, in the '80s, they were a pretty different act than 10 years before. I do think of that song as a novelty thing, and like a lot of what they did a lot better. When they started out, they were a great blues and basic rock/soul band.

 

 

I was already working on blues harp around when their first album came out ('70; I was 12), and Magic Dick blew me away, let's say. And also he was the featured instrumentalist an an arena-filling rock band. I remember I auditioned later for a band that was doing  Kiss covers and suchlike, and Magic Dick was the only possible reason they could even conceive having a harmonica in a group like that. On the other hand, rock harp didn't get that far, and there is no harmonica on 'Centerfold.' This is insane:

 

 

They were kind of tasteless at many times - intentionally - in their stage personae and repertoire: Peter Wolf would wear that tux with a dollar sign, and roll through sort of Wolfman-Jack raps on stage which at times...weren't that great. 'First I Look at the Purse' became their theme song, more or less. They presented themselves as a crass American rock band. But I am telling you they could handle blues and soul-type styles as well as any white people ever, and pushed the boundaries of those forms a bit too.

 

Few bands have ever poured out more energy onstage. I did think of them as America's Rolling Stones. Every album after the first four (J. Geils Band, Morning After, Live: Full House, and Bloodshot) was a very mixed bag, but with really good moments. Dick continued to innovate: over and over he brought sounds out of the harmonica that had never been heard, playing with wah-wah pedals and phase shifters, among other things. They struggled financially through the whole decade, and I think made a conscious decision finally to see how many records they could sell. Can't really blame a band for that.

 

 

It's true! The Beatles got whytheysucked. And remember to keep track of the whole roster.

killer harps

My column for splicetoday this week is a tribute to the great James Cotton and a brief history of amplified blues harp. Includes a playlist of amazing harmonica instrumentals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"You never know -- It might stop us"

 

Interesting article about Britain, English folk music and tradition, and in a way, about us. Stick in the Wheel is a relatively new English Folk Group, and started to wonder about the roots of English traditional music. Nicola Keary and Ian Keary are two members of the band and recorded a series of field recordings of traditional British music with a wide variety of the musicians currently practicing the art. They wrote the piece for the Guardian and it's well worth it. The resulting album, From Here, is being released today and is available as MP3 and CD from Amazon and others. 

The UK is at least as diverse a nation as we are, with many similar problems,  and we share a surprising number of anal-retentive characteristics. The Brits voted for BREXIT with less than half the electorate showing up and a lot of votes in favor of it just because they were pissed off at the seeming inability of government to cope and rather than blame it on themselves for electing the Tory wankers, they decided to blame the EU as the representative of all their woes.

The message of protest is often intrinsic or hidden. It has to be quietly subversive because our enemies are among us: our rulers and bosses

We, of course, had less than half the electorate show up and of that, less than half voted for Donald Trump. Our food, beer and dental work is superior; they have better schools for the most part and a functioning national health service, except they've shown in it and the other aspects of community life that if you want to have nice things as a nation, you need to spend the necessary money. Trump shares little with Margaret Thatcher except greed and basic deep-seated meanness. 

Marshall Tito Puente: A Biography

This was in the LATimes circa 2003, also did some kind of bit on it on NPR.

By Crispin Sartwell

The other day my fifteen-year-old son needed to complete a homework assignment at the very last minute for his Spanish class. From a list of topics he chose to write a biography of Tito Puente. I asked what he knew about Tito Puente, and he told me that he'd googled and found that Tito Puente was a musician and also the leader of a European nation. It came to me that he'd confounded the King of Mambo with the Chair for Life of Yugoslavia.

But the biography would be richer in detail and more coherent if it conflated these eminent lives and so I resolved not to disabuse him. Here, word for word, is his report, for which, with a faith that touched me deeply, he depended on me for the research.

Marshall Tito Puente was that rare combination: political strongman and mambo percussionist. He played the timbale and the vibes as perfectly as he played the political winds that blew through Eastern Europe in the wake of World War 2, riding them to an ecstatic synthesis of absolute power and worldwide pop superstardom.

Indeed, he anticipated the astonishing political/pop crossover acts of our own era, displaying simultaneously the political acumen of a Barbra Streisand and the irresistible pop hookcraft of a Richard Gephardt. He purged his political rivals with the same improvisational megalomania that he employed to dominate the luxurious New York ballrooms of the fifties He'd beat you to death, as it were, with the same sticks he used to make you slither drunkenly around the dance floor in your best outfit.

Marshall Tito Puente was born Josip Broz in 1892 in the tiny village of Kumrovec to a peasant family. He made his name as a salsa agitator in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes between the wars, and was at first an enthusiastic ally of Stalin. Around the same time, he and his sister joined the "Stars of the Future" neighborhood arts organization, where young Tito was noted for his precocious cha-cha. Stalinism served as the model for Tito's "iron irritant of bureaucracy," as well as for his uproarious stage antics, imitated in turn by everyone from Desi Arnaz and Sheila E to Saddam Hussein.

But after leading the Puerto Rican resistance to Hitler - with his death camps and obsession with Patti Page - Tito Puente emerged as the primary figure in the newly constituted Leninist music fad. He served an apprenticeship in some of the finest Latin bands of the period, including those of Juan Peron and Fidel Castro, whom Tito always credited for teaching him the music business.

Finally, he led a fiercely independent Yugoslavia to its break with Charo, whose control of communism on the American airwaves was sagging even as her behavior became more erratic and Diva-esque. At the decisive moment, he issued the classic Dancemania, named in one critics' poll as one of the 25 most influential political manifestoes of the twentieth century.

A newspaper review of the period referred to Tito's "ability to literally drive a crowd crazy with his spicy heat from south of the border," a skill that served him well in international diplomacy, as well as in his efforts to confine political opponents to psychiatric facilities. Later he was to train that seductive beat squarely on Richard Nixon and a series of other American presidents, who invited him to perform at the White House even as they attacked his brand of Marxism. As Watergate broke over a shocked nation, Tito moonlighted as the eldest member of the Jackson 5.

He was declared President for Life in 1976, and in his career recorded about 120 albums, more than almost any other dictator in history. He won five Yugoslav Grammies. His influence is still felt today among members of the current generation of Latin music stars, such as Selena, Enrique Iglesias, and Pervez Musharraf.

So when someone tries to tell me I can't, I tell them right back about Marshall Tito Puente. Anything you can dream of being - tap-dancing firefighter, incredibly stupid professor of physics, white NBA star, or sweet and sour pork - you can be. Be it all and - like Tito - be so much more.

Crispin Sartwell's latest book is "Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives"

pickin and praisin

it made me want to believe. @crispinsartwell (i) is tweeting a series of contemporary bluegrass gospel songs.  i think this is most beautiful popular music, as good or better than it has ever been. here are the first two.

 

 

 

george michael was a fine pop singer. but before you make him an symbol of  huiman liberation, you should ponder a bit. @OwenJones84, as others, treat him as a gay icon, in part because of 'i want your sex.' now, i say that is a pretty great princey pop song. but owen jones should watch the video, because it's very apparently hetero, softcore porn. not exactly a feminist document either. you'd have to say that it's one of the most impressive heterosexist works by a gay person.  

 

the man was quite closeted, yes? until he was arrested for public sex. now, you can celebrate 'the party' as human liberation. you can, like michael purported to, find anonymous sex profoundly innovative or something, i suppose. i'm going to sortof try to hide my disgust, whether it's straight or gay. maybe the drugs were great too: all part of the human road to freedom. however, i have a funny feeling that george michael was loaded to the gills with addictions and compulsions, which were enslaving. also destructive: look at his touring and recording arc, and you will see a good artist who couldn't make art anymore, so free was he. also, dead. owen, and everyone, if that's the liberation you want or admire or are pursuing, i'll have to leave you to it.

 

who?dini

 

 

i really first got exposed to hip hop in maybe '81 or '82, covering the 'get fresh fest' for the baltimore city paper. i saw that lineup three times here and there, i think: basically grandmaster flash and the furious five, fat boys, the teenage ll cool jay, run dmc. it took me some time to even figure out what was going on and why there was no band on stage. i would say that each time i might have been as impressed with whodini (jalil, ecstasy and grandmaster dee) as any of the acts. really, i think they were as good as run dmc, but have been kind of forgotten. 'five minutes of funk' for example, is a great concept, unfoldding in real time ('two minutes left'). some of the tracks, as on 'funky beat' were pretty excellent, radical productions for the era.

 

 

mulleted me

i am implicated in even my most scholarly, objective writing.

great videos of mullet country

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

great mullets of country music

yes! i have published my greatest scholarly achievement, a guide to mullet country. the playlist at the end of the piece really is killer, i feel. here is a gallery:

keith whitley. a legend, like hank williams, but with a mullet.

marty stuart: his hair might be too extreme to be a mullet per se; it is a hyper-mullet or post-mullet.

 

joe diffie skimmed off a lot of the best nashiville songwriting for five years or so.

 

davis daniel: criminally underrated singer in a whitley vein.

 

mark collie

 

aaron tippin in his full glory.

queens of country

 

 

 

 

 

taking suggestions!

 

 

apotheosis of the magdalene

in splicetoday today, i crown the new queen of country music. alert readers of this blog will not be surprised, for i have often raved. related to the piece:

pistol annies

platinum

fly like an eaglesmith

brandy clark: big day in a small town

loving the female artist: a guide 

 

no one could sing this song better than this:

 

the real first ladies