I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE to connect to websites all day. That's the reason I have not posted a video yet. I may or may just try again tomorrow. I'd recommend you try searching in my archive of Saturday Night Radio Drama posts, keeping in mind a lot of things online get taken down fairly quickly.
Is anyone else having this trouble or is it something up with my old junker?
TO DEMONSTRATE THE POINT made here about the class snobbery of the materialist-atheist-scientistic "left" yesterday one of them called me a "dickless jerkoff peasant."
As I stated in that old piece also posted here the other day, the one explaining "olvlzl" a lot of why the left can't win has been the fault of those on the left. In this case on the the M-A-S "left" class snobbery which they can't seem to avoid even as you point out that it is hypocritical and counter-productive on the case of the real left in ever making the mistake that that "left" had anything to do with universal equality, economic justice and was ever anything but an ideological scheme to gain the upper hand against their rivals, the vulgar materialists of the Republican-fascists and the conservative part of the Democratic Party.
I haven't had time to look into this years iteration of that emblem of futility, the "Left Forum" who, in this time of pestilence have moved their timing, not back to match that of Spring break - to accommodate the academic wing of the M-A-S "left," I'd guess - but to the late summer or early fall. When I looked for their website the other day my computer kept giving me dire warnings that they were trying to do something that would endanger my computer, so if you go looking for them, that might happen. So I didn't look at their website. Whatever they do there, I will guarantee you, will be as futile as the going on three-score and ten years they've been having it and its equally futile predecessor The Socialist Scholar's Conference. Nothing worth the effort has come out of it. That "left" has done nothing but defeat the fight for equality and economic justice.
I wonder if the idiot realizes he's used his idol, Woody Allen's hobby as an insult. I told you they are all 12.
Update: By the way, Stupy, I think the word you wanted was "gormless" not "gumless." If you're calling someone a "moron" you should be careful not to make those kinds of mistakes.
Andrew Hill - piano
Marty Ehrlich - alto saxophone
Greg Tardy - tenor saxophone
Ron Horton - trumpet
Scott Colley - bass
Billy Drummond - drums
Andrew Hill Said Not So
There's the slant of light late in August into September that makes me think of Andrew Hill's harmonies and piano voicing. Brilliant sunlight through darker and longer shadows. Maybe that's why I have had his music going through my head this week. Thank heavens it's that instead of some pop music ear worm.
Update: Yeah, the university that gave me my MA in music theory and composition were snowed by someone who "knows nothing about music."
One thing I can tell you, I know how to count a measure of eighth notes in 2/2, 1e&a 2e&a - which Simple Simels demonstrated he doesn't know. I also know what they said in Willy Wonka applies to him, "What do you get from a glut of TV, a pain in the neck and an IQ of three."
IN LAST NIGHT'S batch of hate messages, one insults me as a "toothless moron."
It was one of the most important lessons I learned from my time reading the unedited, mostly unmoderated thinking of self-defined lefties, almost all of them white-collar, college-credentialed, most of them conventional adherents of materialist-atheist-scientism, that snobbery was rampant among them. Much of it was regional much of it was absurdly chauvinistic, VIRTUALLY ALL OF IT WAS SNOBBERY OF THE MIDDLE AND UPPER CLASSES AGAINST PEOPLE WHO WERE POOR AND DESTITUTE.
One of the early class-based insults was derision about "trailer trash" living in a trailer being something that poor people of some but not many means have to do. "Toothless" is certainly even more of a disgusting insult against people too poor to even have the healthcare that dental care certainly is.
In the United States, due to the efforts of the rich and otherwise affluent preventing universal healthcare for so long, we barely have some healthcare for tens and scores of millions of us and it doesn't include dental care. And Bernie Sanders has pointed out that the cost of dental care has risen drastically. That's not the fault of the poor, it's the fault of people who in some cases are probably making fun of the "toothless".
I'm hardly toothless, yet, but like many who had the misfortune of trying to make a life in music or other arts, my ability to afford dental care has been spotty. If it happens I'll probably have a hard time affording decent dentures.* That was a consequence of my decision to make my living in music, something the consequences of which I ALWAYS point out to my students, so I don't deserve any pity you should reserve for those who lose their teeth due to no decision they had any power to make. Though you should hold the pity and struggle for full, universal healthcare including dental care.
Don't trust anyone on the left who issues those kinds of insults, they're the ones who will either win the left enemies among the poor or turn on "the left" as soon as they think their bread is buttered on the right side.
* But I'll never have to resort to covering a bald spot by affecting a stupid looking Groucho beret.
IF I WANTED to take up your time with repeating something it wouldn't be something you certainly already heard to death. I'd repost the great, neglected and too little known Andrew Hill's brilliant compositions. Starting with the first one posted here,
Smoke Stack
Piano: Andrew Hill
Double Bass: Richard Davis
Double Bass: Eddie Khan
Drums: Roy Haynes
Yes, Andrew Hill used two basses for this recording. I could have posted this as a memorial for my recently departed friend who studied drums alongside Roy Haynes, though he gave it up for a STEM career.
Posted by olvlzl
The
question has come up again, what does “olvlzl” stand for. While the
temptation is strong to echo Groucho Marx and say, “he’ll stand for a
lot” the fact is no one seems to be pushing that particular envelope at
this time of my life.
Some
of you may remember a commenter on many of these leftist blogs who
went by the name EPT, a name chosen to honor the author of The Making of
the English Working Class. As an aging gay man EPT was quite
innocent of the fact that it was also the name of a product that was
associated with urine. Having been ribbed about that and, shortly
after, having had the letters olvlzl come up on the random letter
generator of the comments board of the blog Mercury Rising,
EPT decided to see if there were any ways those letters could
generate ribbing or anagrams. Finding none, he impetuously chose them
as his own. Fate seemed to dictate it.
Echidne’s
blog takes as its theme the great subject of feminism, it encompasses
the lives and interests of more than half the human population. If
feminism was represented in the way that subject deserves to be it would
be ‘masculinist’ blogs that would be noteworthy as an alternative
viewpoint.
My blog,
olvlzl, has a much more modest theme, how the left can change its
behavior to win politically. That theme, though more modest, requires
that the ways that leftists characteristically act, speak and think be
investigated to see possible self-defeating follies. What do we do that
makes our agenda, so much in the interest of the vast majority of
people, fail so regularly at the polls. It’s not all what they do to
us, a lot of it is what we do to ourselves. A lot of what we do allows
the right to caricature us, to lie about us in order to defeat us.
As in the two longer pieces posted below it is also a matter of us
giving them the rope to hang us with. That is a situation that cannot
go unchanged either for what they do to us or what we allow them to do
to us for whatever noble sounding reason. It is sometimes noble sound
that signifies very little.
That
is what the pieces I’ve posted here this weekend are about. If they
are unsettling, this essential change without which we will never win,
is bound to be. I hope that your disagreement and ideas will help to
further the work of finding the way, they have taught me a lot in the
four months I’ve been doing this. Most of all, I hope we will find ways
to win. Everything depends on our winning elections, taking office and
changing laws. Everything.
Update: Looking back, I don't have the same respect for E. P. Thompson's book or the idea of a "working class" now that I did then. The term seems to me to be mostly to set apart the working poor from the destitute and to turn the immediate near destitute against the class that does them the least instead of the most harm. I also fell out with most of the crowd I electronically hung around with back then, though not Echidne who I hope returns to writing soon.
My investigations into what the left did wrong and observing the unedited thinking of many college-credentialed, would be lefties taught me a lot of things that drove me farther left, into economic justice based in the Jewish religious tradition, a higher view of life and, so, human life than any ideological materialist-atheist-scientistic POV can ever produce. But the answer to the question remains the same as it did then.
LET ME POSE A HYPOTHETICAL which could, in the near future not be so hypothetical.
What if the splendid effort of current scientists and medical experts to develop vaccines had been seriously delayed or if they had not been successful? Could we have tolerated the propagandizing FOR THE VIRUS in the media, by the courts to continue even this long? I can guarantee you if the virus had not been even temporarily batted down that it would have eventually reached the top level of our society, the one for which the courts, the Senate really work and they would be clamoring for the very things their media has been dismissing for more than a year and a half so they could get Trump reinstalled by the corrupt Electoral College. If the billionaires, the lords of the Supreme Court, the Senate, had started dying in large numbers, the freedom of the FOX-Facebook, etc. Covid carriers and their ilk would have been shut down BY THE GOVERNMENT, Constitution, Bill of Rights, be damned. As it is, they have always figured the people who were dying were expendable in the name of their "principles."
They would have told those who are freely spouting lies ON THEIR MEDIA to shut up, or they would have shut them up by not having them on, by letting the carriers of disease lies and so death, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, etc. to change their line or they would get canned.
But they feel secure, Rupert Murdoch with a small fleet of Land Rovers (it was said) hauled his foetid old ass to get inoculated as soon as it was available to a rich old scumbag like himself, you can bet that everyone who goes into his offices in New York City has because they require a vaccine passport to get in, including the scum who are talking tens and hundreds of thousands to act as petri dishes for the virus to evolve into newer lines, some of which seem to be good at breaking through the protection of the vaccines. There is nothing to guarantee that such a wide spread virus won't quickly develop strains that could totally overtake our scientists abilities to fight it.
With every increase in the disease among the vaccinated in numbers and over time, among and the unmasked and the congregated, the chances that a strain that overcomes the vaccines entirely goes up.
The private sector, the friggin' free press, freed from any responsibility of paying for the effects of its dishonest content is doing that, HAS DONE IT NOW. There is a good possibility that as well as the scores and hundreds of thousands who the freed press has gotten killed here now, it could lead to millions, tens or even a hundred million being killed by Covid-19. And all on the theory of liberty that it is a good thing that they can do that, that they are free of government restraint to do that, that we can rely on the responsibility of businessmen and tycoons and billionaires to do that out of their own financial self-interest - does anyone make any pretense of the media acting out of a sense of morality anymore? The libertarian theory of press freedom has its definitive refutation in the American media's pushing the pro-virus lies even as so many of them were vaccinated in secret and believe they and those few they care about are now immune from the disease.
I have named things in the Constitution which are, in fact, responsible for things getting as bad as they have, the pathetically inadequate First Amendment as written and as interpreted by the Supreme Court under four different Chief "Justices," the anti-democratic Electoral College which the Court used to impose Bush II and which gave us Trump, the anti-democratic Senate. The power the Supreme Court gave itself to overturn laws duly adopted by the Congress and Executive - even those to protect the legitimacy of the government by protecting the rights of The People to vote and to have that vote counted, is one that can be blamed on the Constitution because they didn't figure on a court overreaching so far to such bad consequence and getting away with it under their "separation of powers" scheme.
One of my biggest fears is that events that have already resulted from the defects and shortcomings of our Constitution are going to worsen and overtake it, the laws delays, their customary ass dragging, could get more people killed than have died now. Science moved faster and more effectively than I had thought it would, it is running as fast as it can to just maintain the foothold on the disease it has. Judges, "Justices," scheming, client pleasing sleazebag lawyers can drag out the law to more than stop that progress, it has the power under our system to kill it, and if they don't the American media has been doing that under the First Amendment continually since the virus first was discovered.
The above is the product of a sleepless night, worrying about the start of school here.
Piano: Brad Mehldau
Drums: Brian Blade
Bass: Christian McBride
Saxophone: Joshua Redman
the myriad of really terrible Beatles covers pointed out to me today, one by a woman who might be the reincarnation of Florence Foster Jenkins without her taste or sophistication - she does the Beatles and other Western pop music - but, unfortunately for her, not with FFJ's gift for being deaf to the derision* - I'm not going to waste your time with the old and awful. I'll let the pop music scribblers do that. I was kind of tempted to post Mae West singing Day Tripper, she's safely dead so her feelings can't be hurt.
* I am genuinely sad for her. I hope she finds something worthwhile to do with her time, something that keeps her away from music for which she has less than no ability. Not surprising what she likes.
Update: If you don't go away I'll post the one that appears to be the Soviet version of Dad's Navy doing "Let It Be". And that's not the worst of them, by a long shot. The Fab Four made a lot of money from some really awful versions of their stuff. 101 Strings version of "Help" for example. You may have heard that at the grocery store between announcements of specials in isle D and that the owner of a green Plymouth should go to the service desk immediately.
Update 2: I'm kind of hurt that DAS would say that about me, he must know it's not true. Maybe it's said in jest.
I remember his blog with fondness, I believe I encouraged him to restart it after he gave up. We used to be the kind of friends that you make online when you'll never meet the person in real life. He was a window into the great Masorti (Conservative) tradition of Jewish religion, which I came to respect quite highly. It was fascinating to me how intricate the Jewish tradition was and how varied. It was like some of the more esoteric topics in mathematics or physics the way he described it. I knew I was too old to catch up. I never understood why he hung out at Eschaton, it's not like he got a lot of respect there, you've got to be stupid and mean to get that there. But he's a grown up, he has a right to choose his own unsuitable companions if he wants to. I noticed that he's one of the few bloggers who listed my first blog, olvlzl, in his blog list. I always thought it was a small but distinguished company, especially as I didn't know how to post a blog-list yet. Maybe I should put him on the one here, it's still worth a look.
THE FOX-RIGHT WING MEDIA, Facebook, etc. are the primary carriers of the Republican-fascist attempt to get as many Americans killed by Covid as possible BECAUSE THEY THINK IT WILL BENEFIT THEM POLITICALLY AND SO FINANCIALLY.
What's the difference between them and the most feared of anti-American terror groups? Al Qaeda are penny ante compared to the Republicans in Congress, on Courts, in State Houses and the "free press" that serves them.
Fuel the backlash against the effort to get more hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans killed by Covid which is rampant in the American media. If we can't protect ourselves from them by law and regulation, our Constitution has failed at its stated purpose and must be replaced by something that does.
Cannonball Adderly - Who Cares?
Bill Evans - piano
Percy Heath - acoustic bass
Connie Kay - drums
Update: Since my collection of CDs and LPs are boxed up and inaccessible, I refreshed my memory of his discography online and it would seem Cannonball Adderley was unusually uninterested in the Mop Heads' music as I can find none of them listed as composers on any of the LPs he released before his too early and tragic death. Adderley was not much of a pops-elevator music type performer. Whoever was behind the 101 Strings line would seem to have been more interested as it seems a number of such arrangements of Beatles songs were pressed on LPs as Cannonball seems not to have gotten around to doing much in that line.
While doing other things yesterday I did listen to this interview with Pat Metheney who at one point said Gary Burton's early fusion experiments, his expansion of the practice of imporisational music, by which I think he might also include A Genuine Tong Funeral, or at least his bands of that period, said of it, "that band was like the Beatles for me." Metheney has, at least to my recollection, had some minimal presence of some Mop Heads songs in his vast body of recorded work. But, then, I never claimed he didn't, though I will have when Simps lies and says I claimed that. I'd have needed to have had two lives for the past twenty years to have said all the things Simps lies about me having said. It's not as if I haven't had lots to say on my own during that time. Maybe he doesn't understand what I did say so he does what Bertrand Russell says stupid people do and why they're unreliable on the sidebar.
REPUBLICAN-FASCIST MEDIA has performed the ultimate act of crying "fire" in a crowded theater with their spreading lies and paranoia about Covid-19, if our Supreme Court and the First Amendment doesn't stop them from doing what they've done, getting hundreds of thousands of Americans killed by their "free press" "free speech" the Supreme Court and the civil liberties industry as as guilty as FOX, Facebook and the rest of them.
They are killing us in the hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions and the law chooses to be the ultimate ass in letting them get away with it forever.
Vibraphone: Gary Burton
Alto Saxophone: Jim Odgren
Bass Guitar: Steve Swallow
Drums: Mike Hyman
Composer: Carla Bley
OTHER THAN THE TIME I BROKE MY FRIGGIN' ARM and bereavements, I've posted just about every day since starting this blog based from various junker laptop computers all from the tiny little old, typing desk with a bent fold down shelf, situated in various places in my little house.
I'm at the point where I need to move in with a relative who needs someone living with her so I've got to move and while I'm doing it I won't have time to post much here. I will be perhaps be posting something before the beginning of September but there will be a number of days when I won't have time. I hope everyone will be waiting anxiously for my return to regular writing but, then, I hope I win the lottery and that I'll wake up to find people have finally come to their senses too. Hope isn't exactly the same thing as expectation.
I expect I will post something but it won't be every day.
See you later.
THIS ONE ABOUT the myth that the Catholic Church banned the tri-tone because they thought it summoned the devil had some things in it I'd never known, the ones I did know were quite accurate. It reminds me of the time I got into it with a few of the "brain trusters" (they really have called their home blog the "Brain Trust" I'm not making that up) over the idiotic claim that "The Catholic Church banned the third."
The attribution of the common received unwisdom on this to the romantic period is something I haven't checked out, given that that what I knew was accurately represented, I'd guess that was too. It took me being exposed to such idiocy online and going back to check the original sources to make me understand what a disaster for intellectual honesty the "enlightenment" and its spawn, the 19th century romantic era have been. Not that the previous ages were anything to want to go back to, just that once they could make any claim they wanted to, all hell broke lose. The morons who spout it online (at one point retired semi-pro virgin, officially held to be "public intellectual" Little Benny Shapiro spouts it in the video) would probably have gotten it from a pop version of that 19th century a-history, Apparently some of that vetted by the big brains of heavy metal.
One thing is so clear it should constitute a law of nature, anything you blame on "The Church," especially the Catholic Church, will be repeated endlessly no matter what a load of bull shit it is. It's my experience that in the college-credentialed once that bull shit is swallowed, you can't talk them into admitting it's bull shit no matter how many primary sources and examples you show them. I think it's pretty shocking how resistant to evidence most of them are. The scholastic period of the middle-ages were more open to evidence than a lot of those around today.
We are in a darker age than the dark ages, all of that college-credentialing hasn't made it better.
JUST GOT DONE TALKING TO A SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER HERE, he said it's obvious that there is an organized effort by the anti-faxxers, the ones he knows were there, by and large Republican-fascists, to pressure school boards to not require masks in the schools. And this is in allegedly liberal New England.
I AM FED UP. FROM NOW ON ANYONE WHO ISN'T FUELING AND STOKING THE BACKLASH AGAINST THE ANTI-MASK, ANIT-VAXX MURDERERS AND THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS WHO CREATED THEM, THE FOX-STYLE MEDIA WHO POISONED THEIR MINDS IS PART OF THE PROBLEM.
BRING ON THE BACKLASH, THE SANE MAJORITY HAVE GOT TO CRUSH THEM INTO THE RIDICULE AND POWERLESSNESS THEY DESERVE. THE LIVES OF TENS, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS, MAYBE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS DEPEND ON THAT.
THE EXTENT TO WHICH the people who work in "journalism" are either compelled or feel compelled to stick to what they and their bosses think of as the most popular view of the military, of wars, has a lot to do with the conventional view of the end of America's involvement with propping up the failed Afghan government and the army which made deals with the Taliban and then melted away without a fight. That myth includes the whole notion of "nation building" as what we do after the American military, the strongest and most well equipped on Earth, goes in and smashes things, which they can do quite well. They can get rid of what is there at any given time, they cannot change a country or a collection of feudal states - what Afghanistan is - and turn it into little America. If our media and the "pundit" class, itself a product of the media that elevates them to that stagnant and eutrophic guess pool, cared enough to learn from the recent history of that nonsense, they'd never have pretended that's what was going to happen. They and the people who went into Afghanistan pretending they could create a freedom for women, for others in Afghanistan by setting up girls schools and establishing various schemes for setting women up in business in a few of the cities - where most people don't live, to start with, were setting up a small minority who liked that idea. I feel sorry for those who get left behind and got targets put on their back, they are real tragic figures in this.
The fact is the media, almost all of the pundits don't give the slightest damn about the people of Afghanistan, as is being documented, the media sure as hell did their best to largely ignore them as did the Bush II regime as soon as it got its real war of preference, the invasion of Iraq, another disastrous result by the feigned nobility of our pundit class and those it works for in Republican-fascist administrations. They will use the plight of women, the horrors of the Taliban rule, the murders, especially if they are beheadings or stonings or other picturesque, terror theater barbarities and the such. Where was the coverage of the crimes of the Taliban in the areas they quickly gained power over all during the past 20 years? I would guess the same nowhere in evidence that their non-coverage of such things in acceptable dictatorships like Saudi Arabia or other Western created hell holes like Congo - Joe Biden goes down as the most honest American President of our lifetimes for his honest, plain-talk about that. I can tell you one thing, I am not waiting for a post-presidency to say that about Joe Biden the way I did in expressing my respect for Jimmy Carter, I'm saying it right now.
I am expecting this to be the turning point in the American media trying to do what they inevitably do with Democratic presidents, they tear them down in ways they never do Republicans no matter how bad. Not in the past and not now when the only alternative to Democratic governance is Republican-fascist mob rule.
No, I give the American media, especially that on TV and the radio and the internet the loathing that it has earned, with very few exceptions. They are in the business of selling themselves, Jefferson's stupid view of them was based on having little experience of what they would soon become, though he may have had some slight knowledge of that during his own presidency. Anyone who would prefer the thing it has become under "free press" absolutism is a tool of gangsters.
southpaw
@nycsouthpaw
·
17h
It took me while to understand that part of the press corps is grieving, not for the dead, but for the war.
That puts it so well it seems superfluous to add anything but there's more to it than that.
Most of the people in the media realize something they won't admit, they are in show business, they have to generate buzz and interest in what they put on or eyes won't remain on their programs and advertisers won't pay them. More than that, their careers will stagnate and in show biz a stagnant career is one that's over. They'll get cancelled or not called to be on the cabloids or the Sunday morning lie shows, etc.
I think a good majority of those on the news, especially in the DC and NYC press corps are determined that no matter what the facts are, their words and gestures must go along with the expected, orthodox line on American wars which must always be for good and noble reasons, must always make rational sense if not be wise and must be supported no matter what because "support the troops" has been instilled as part of the de-facto American civil religion, certainly by show biz in the wake of the last major disaster, the war that started in Vietnam but was enormously expanded to ever more disaster into much of South-East Asia. There are literally no numbers of local dead that could change that American media narrative, there would appear to be a very large number of Americans dead before the media changes its narrative, though merely ending the draft had that effect for cynical Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
The media, most of those you see on TV and the internet and the radio for the most part and most of the time chose to merely ignore the 20 year long war that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney started, that's what you do in the conventional narrative which is required by habit and ill considered convention when attacked. The American media can be counted on to ignore things that go on too long because they need novelty to serve their prime purpose, which is getting and keeping an audience, not in serving the best interests of the United States or the world. The pundit class is a part of that, their prime purpose is to peddle their own wares, including, often, their ersatz expertise, their newspaper column or magazine scribbling, their invitations to be on CNN or ABC, NPR, PBS, C-Span, etc. it is a circle jerk the prime purpose of which is to serve their careers of serving the interests of the American establishment but, also, to bring in an audience.
The stupid and naive faith in the guaranteed good effects, ultimately, of allowing the media to say whatever they want to, no matter how separated it is from fact or reality or wisdom, has certainly been shattered in the past fifty years of ultimate press freedom here. They serve primarily themselves when allowed to and those whose financial and, so, ideological purposes also serve their owners and their associates.
How you can force the media to a. stop lying, b. stop having on liars and idiots, c. serve the public need for accurate information, etc. I don't know, I do know that when they are allowed to do what they do 24-7-365 the results are illegitimate presidencies, Republican-fascist congresses and state houses, incompetence of the kind that led to the Bush II regime ignoring the warnings that 9-11 was coming and the resultant catastrophe for Afghanistan and, since it was sold with 9-11, Iraq, the resultant empowerment of ISIS in Kurdish territory, Syria, etc. and everything up to and including the regrets of the pundit class and the media that Joe Biden has decided to expend the political capital he has to end the folly of the Afghan war.
The media is what got us here. It is on them, they will try to move it onto Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Democrats but they are what got us here, they and the Florida Republican Party under Jeb Bush, their cousin Ellis at FOX and the Rehnquist Supreme Court that installed the incompetent Bush and the war-monger Cheney.
If this happens again, I hope our allies in Afghanistan will realize the price THEY paid for the folly that was generated from the American habits of allowing the media to lie with abandon along side the many booby traps for good government contained in our Constitutional system. I hope the experience of this disaster will teach them to be less willing to go along the next time. Because if the American media can be counted on for something, it is to make sure there is a next time.
