Fredrik Deboer on "The Cleverness Ghetto", deleted, but thematically connected to Josephine Livingstone's piece on the scam of womens media at TNR

Deboer deleted it but it seems thematically of a piece with the Livingstone piece I just discussed.

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2018/07/26/the-cleverness-ghetto/

 

A lot of people are unhappy, because the world is a brutal place. But some people’s unhappiness is embedded in a fierce dedication to living a life of integrity, if not of meaning, and some people’s unhappiness is embedded in cleverness. If you observe social media, you will come away thinking that cleverness is the only virtue human beings have ever valued. The pursuit of cleverness is the white-knuckled endeavor of the gold star kids who grew up to write the world.

What I’ve come to realize is that cleverness has become a ghetto, a ghetto of mind and habit, and that most of the writers inside it are desperately unhappy without knowing why. And I have also come to realize that this is a gendered phenomenon. There is a whole pocket industry of young women whose dictate is to be clever in all things. And while this position might seem temporarily like a place of power, given how reliably its inhabitants sop up compliments from the writing crowd, it is really just another niche that women have been forced into, another prison where they are rendered blunt and unobjectionable. That it all feels so cutting in the moment does not obscure the fact that, from a distance, you can see that they’ve all been defanged.

That guy who started Bustle took a lot of grief, and righteously so. His calculation was gross and cynical and in service to his dullard’s version of capitalism. But in recognizing that women’s media is a constellation of ghettos, he knew the score.

It's not surprising that the post got deleted since to assert that the cleverness ghetto is a gendered phenomenon could be contested, easily.  There are plenty of men who are in whatever the cleverness ghetto may be. 

But the concluding paragraph with reference to Bustle, it seems that there's a sidelong observation that the pocket industry may have done something that is in some ways more damaging to women writers than to silence them, co-opting them and branding them in a way that gives them a niche market which can then be exploited and cordoned off away from anything that might resemble a journalistic mainstream.  What might be sincerely registered as a kind of protest has been assimilated as a niche product. 

Josephine Livingstone on the womens' media scam, how even ostensibly feminist media has devolved into advertising and comparative consumption codes

In the age of TL:DR a way to summarize what follows could be to say that whatever feminism set out to accomplish it all too often can be seized by marketing that transforms the lofty ideals of feminism into targeted advertising and conspicuous consumption as identity.

 

https://newrepublic.com/article/150010/womens-media-scam

By Josephine Livingstone

July 19, 2018

 

This week Refinery29, a lifestyle website for women, came crashing into the public consciousness via an unpleasant installment of its “Money Diaries” column. In it, a 21-year-old HR intern making $25 per hour gives us a blow-by-blow account of her financial life. She pays $2,100 a month for her share of an apartment in the West Village. She pays $23 for a goat cheese and avocado wrap. She goes to the Hamptons with her “girl squad” for a weekend of overpriced parties, but it ends up being a bust. “Finally we arrive at Sunset Beach,” she writes. “The water is rough, and we wish we hadn’t taken out the dingy [sic]. I would’ve much rather been on the big boat. All the rosé is gone by the time we raft up.”

 How does the unnamed intern afford these expenses, all while going to college? Her rent, health insurance, phone bill, and entertainment subscriptions are all covered by her folks, who also pay for her college. Furthermore, as she writes, “On top of my intern salary, my parents give me a $800/month allowance, and my grandpa also wires me $300 every month (#blessed).”

Aka "privilege"? Sometimes a person has to wonder if it's ever gone the other way and if the "kid" ever had to wire money to the "adult".  Since I don't actually read anything at Refinery29 this is all a little bit abstract to me but the "privilege" part doesn't seem hard to infer from the narrative evidence at hand.

The column has raised hackles, through a combination of the subject’s lack of self-awareness and her financial privilege, lightly worn. But our anger at the diarist disguises a deeper and more diffuse anger, over the way that companies like Refinery29 exploit a branded version of feminism to make money off us, the casual reader.

If that is the case—and this latest Money Diary certainly does feature a lot of brand namedropping—then the problem is not just the article, but the platform itself.

Or perhaps we should say that the problem is an entire industry. Women’s media has run on advertising dollars forever, after all. There exists not a single mainstream women’s magazine that does not rely on money from the fashion and beauty industries. Not Vogue, not Cosmopolitan. All these magazines compromise their editorial freedom to maintain relationships with their advertisers. Vogue cannot run a huge story criticizing a brand that advertises in its pages. This is an open secret in journalism, but one so old that people barely care.

One of my friends was approached a few times when she was a teenager about being a model.  She continuously shot down all the recruiting attempts.  What she told me was she had seen enough fashion magazines and learned just enough about the beauty industry that she felt it was not ethical for her as a Christian and a woman to join an industry whose whole point was to make women feel insecure about their bodies and from that then buy a bunch of beauty products they didn't need.  She wanted to be a wife and mother in her twenties and focused on how to maintain her health and to, if it could happen, have children in her early to mid-twenties so her body was optimally able to bear the physical stress of childbirth. 

In a way it's just Captain Obvious to say publications are beholden to the advertisers and sponsors but Livingstone's point seems to be that this is even more suffocatingly true about the beauty and fashion industries than may be the case across institutional journalism.

Women’s media has also run on the first-personal travails of women. Though it sets a wildly different editorial tone, the Money Diaries invoke the ghost of xoJane, which exploited readers and writers alike by holding a “contest” for the best “It Happened To Me” first-person story. What happened was that it ran an endless stream of unpaid blog posts in which readers were invited to offer up their most traumatic experiences in return for zero dollars. The site came to represent the worst of the Personal Essay Industrial Complex, in which a publication creams the profits off women’s trauma, especially women of color, in the name of feminist solidarity.

The difference between today’s women’s media scam and yesterday’s is that the advertising is now hiding in “native” content, and the scummy clickbait is packaged better. Instead of sitting in a box next to a trashy article about celebrities, lucrative advertising these days lurks inside content that simulates ethical, feminist journalism.

We could cue up any number of thoughts about the first-person industrial complex here. 

on Bennett's essay

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/09/laura-bennett-at-slate-on-first-person.html

on the applicability of the first-person industrial complex ethos and praxis as a way to understand Mark Driscoll's persona or brand

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-first-person-industrial-complex.html

on Joe Carter's piece about "pseudo-events", how these are publicity stunts, and how evangelicalism is probably as reliant on the first-person industrial pseudo-event for its kind of branding as mainstream womens' media is.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/12/ht-phoenix-preacher-joe-carter-writes.html

on Merve Emre's observations about the first-person essay and two paths it could take.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/08/merve-emre-at-boston-review-discusses.html

another piece cross referencing Brad Sargent's work on peak-personal-essay and how in the wake of the 2016 election one of the mistakes that got made was conflating the personal essay with actual journalism, which has application for watchblogs.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/05/some-more-thoughts-on-what-some-call.html

To be clear, I'm not against first person essays or personal experience essays.  They're fine.  The concern I began to have over the last decade was how in American journalism and blogging the personal essay was at times treated as being coextensive with actual journalism.  There's two ways to put this. The first is to repeat what my journalism professor said about editorials, that nobody cares what "you" think in your editorial, they want to be able to make informed decisions based on what the facts are and editorial pieces are where you say what you think people should do and that has to appeal to evidence which is where journalism is supposed to come in. 

The second way to put it is that in an era in which megachurch preachers and celebrity Christians leverage pretty much exactly the same kinds of heart-string yanking personal narratives the field of journalism becomes more important.  Young guys with a gonzo bent an imagine that the persona of Hunter S Thomson is all they need to be readable and relevant.  Hardly anything could be further from the truth as journalism goes.  I'm not exactly a fan of Hunter S but he was still doing journalism, and as has been said about the recently departed Tom Wolfe the fact that so very many guys failed to do what Wolfe did may have sprung from their misunderstanding of what he was actually doing.  That's all thematically relevant to the subject at hand in the sense that people who have the privilege and opportunity to participate in the first-person industrial complex should be aware that there's this jaded axiom that if the news isn't explicitly bad news then it's probably PR or advertising.

The design of the new generation of moneyspinning sites is good. Glance at Bustle and you’ll miss the fact that it is a cynical enterprise. Since 2015, a large flurry of women’s lifestyle websites and newsletters has splattered the internet in response to digital media marketing trends. “This is a massive opportunity,” Bustle founder Bryan Goldberg (who recently purchased the archives of Gawker.com) told AdAge in 2016. “The pie is enormous ... We’ve been kind of wondering why more people haven’t been jumping into this demographic.” In the same article, Jonathan Adams, chief digital officer of Maxus Americas (now Wavemaker), said, “It’s a great time to be marketed to as a woman.”

Women’s media, as a result, has never been scammier. The product sold by Refinery29, Bustle, PopSugar, and TheSkimm is bad. I asked a group of women journalist friends to name the worst villains in the game off the top of their heads, and the answers flowed easily: the GirlBoss publishing platform, Babe.net, the Lily.

Once we had ads for shampoo—now we have sites pretending they aren’t secretly running a branding agency from inside their feminist publishing project. It’s like Coca-Cola trying to sell you self-care. Seen from its most depressing angle, the rise of these websites is part of a wider deterioration of choice, quality, and consciousness across the all media products branded “feminist.” It’s every woman in New York wearing the same mediocre makeup. It’s a co-working space that buys off its critics with free memberships in order to maintain its perfectly pink, girly, Teflon brand. It’s a quality outlet like The Cut running Sex Diaries, the lowest-hanging fruit in all the land.

If there is a takeaway from the storm in a gilded teacup that was the great Refinery29 scandal of July 2018, it must be that there is no ethical consumption of women’s media in an industry where feminism has become a product, and where your engagement with the product is exchanged for branding dollars. The “feminism” brand is making media stupider, its consumers less rather than more cynical. Save your outrage over $23 goat cheese wraps, and steer clear of clicking the ads.

Even Joan Didion, who infamously declared that feminism had stopped being a cause and had become a symptom, and this back in 1970, is known for brand affiliations as much as for her writing.  It may only be less galling in her case because her icy elitist stance was pretty much front and center from the start of her literary career.  She was part of a kind of American aristocracy, more or less knew it, and didn't really even hide it, either.

Refinery29 combines lifestyle content (fashion, skincare, diaries, work advice) with inspirational feminist sentiment and an embrace of queer identities. It also eases up the boundaries of journalism so that the lucrative world of marketing and PR and branding can seep in at the edges. The combination sits uneasily. The “MyIdentity” section, for example, currently leads with an article titled “How Fashion Helps These 3 People Express Pride [Paid Content].” It’s an ad for H&M, dressed up as an article about queer and trans people finding their voice through clothing. There’s also “The Old, Secret Style Language Of The LGTBQ+ Community,” a mere click away from an advertisement by Free People on what to wear to an outdoor summer concert.

As Digiday has reported, Refinery29’s employees freely hashtag products from sponsors on their personal accounts. The line between editorial and “editorial content” seems minimal to nonexistent. Per Digiday, Refinery29’s editorial teams both create branded content and work as influencers for brands on social media. The Refinery29 office hosts branded pop-up events and lectures. Readers don’t seem to mind. An agency source told Digiday: “It’s something we expect users to push back a little bit more on, and they don’t.”

The difficulty of distinguishing between actual journalism and "sponsored content" was one of the running themes of South Park season 19 or 20, was it? 

But the Money Diaries column did get pushback. It made people wonder: Is this even real content? How stupid does Refinery29 think we are? As Gabby Noone has theorized on Twitter, there is a possibility that Refinery29 embedded sponsorships into “Money Diaries” columns, with one contributor suspiciously citing the services of a company called Thrive Market numerous times.

Perhaps we could propose that there is absolutely nothing that can’t be monetized by the market and the purer the self-designated and self-perceived cause the more readily it can be observed to be leveraged as the foundation of market. If this was so observably true about religion why couldn’t the same be said about feminism?

 

Now I hope I don't have to unpack the ways in which I think that canard is historically dubious in both cases, but the commodification of feminism and religion in American culture does seem of a piece.  Anti-feminist social conservatism seems just as much fixated on branded consumption patterns as indicative of masculinity as feminism can seem permeated by consumption as symbolic of feminism or femininity. 

Fredrik Deboer "To call things by their right names" looks to be the sequel to "the ground floor", warning the left that social democratic is not the same as socialist

Having read Deboer for a couple of years I kind of had an impression that "The Ground Floor" was a part 1 that was paving the way for a part 2.  It looks like part 2 arrived.

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2018/07/22/to-call-things-by-their-right-names/

The basic condition of the American radical left, today, is a rising social democrat movement that, for complex (and predominantly social) reasons, insists on calling itself a socialist movement. Bernie Sanders, a jobs guarantee, DSA, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jacobin, Medicare for all – each worthy of praise, each fundamentally and existentially social democratic and thus not socialist.

Perhaps the order of the day is social democracy. A social democratic movement is a proud thing. I’d love to see it spread. But we must be able to call things by their right names. And while I understand the social conditions that make it hard for people to admit that they are not socialists, for the good of everyone – and especially for the good of their own movement – they should publicly accept their identity at social democrats. It is a necessary and inevitably step.

I am the sort of pessimistic person who doesn't think that either capitalism or socialism can ever exist in the real world, that these respective ideologies are unattainable in theory and promulgate massacre and mass death in practice.  The more I look back on the Cold War and the legacies of the partisan blocs the more impossible it seems to regard either side as "the good guys".  If I thought socialism could actually exist in the real world I might suggest people veer toward non-Marxist forms of socialism because they obviously have existed for a while.

But ... the reason I mention Deboer's post is that he seems aware of a problem that will come about, and has been in play for decades since the end of the Cold War, that reactionaries will broadbrush all forms of proposed socialism and the platform of social democrats as "socialist" and also as inextricably linked to Marxist thought, whether of a Leninist or a Maoist or whatever variety.  It will not be difficult for people on the right to trot out the various times in which class revolutions led to the liquidation of intellectuals and competent farmers and in some countries revolutionaries would decide to kill anyone who wore glasses as probably being a member of a decadent intelligentsia if they didn't already have a working class job.

My hunch has been Deboer is advising social democrats to call themselves by their real names and not pander to people who may think they're socialists because in the age of Trump that's the fast self-affixed labeled way to distance yourself from all things Trump.

Or as John Halle has blogged in the last couple of years, at some point any functional American left has to live with the reality of how power will be used if they ever get even local level political office, rather than endlessly vamp on the riff of purity of ideology.  The counsel seems reasonable since I know from my red state family and friends that they really do collapse liberalism with Marxism, socialism, communism, intersectionality, LGBTQ and all across the board.  If progressives want to make some kidn of long-term progress divesting themselves of the propagandistic dynamics of the DNC and GOP respectively might be a good idea.  Not having a totalitarian commitment to a panoply of ostensibly left or liberal causes might not be a bad idea, either.  Even Franky Schaeffer, hopeless blue state hack that he has become, managed to suggest in Crazy for God that the DNC shot itself in the foot by refusing to concede there could be pro-life people who might be very progressive on economic issues who would not sign on for a maximalist pro-abortion platform.

A lot of what passes for liberal or progressive causes may in the long run turn out to be the interests of the aspirational managerial castes who love the idea of having as much freedom as aristocrats and can pass this off as progressive by dint of the rainbow banner rather than addressing more traditionally working class issues.  In that sense I'm more sympathetic with the old left and even post-Marxist thought than I am with the new left.  I don't blame an old school Marxist like Adorno for regarding the nascent new left as being more or less like the fascists.  To look at how intersectionality advocates write Adorno's riff on how the resurgence neo-pagan polytheistic mythology was worse than the Judeo-Christian monotheistic mythology ... but I don't feel like slogging into that on a weekend, or at least not this weekend.

He had another post up I was planning to link to but it's down. 

Francis Poulenc: Sarabande for guitar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnM7BVsXyD8

after you watch that video for the score ... go listen to the Narciso Yepes version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8sifrYYK2U

And here's one by Rob Mackillop (hi Rob, you may remember me from Delcamp here and there)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXZkEyydZgs

Poulenc wrote the Sarabande as a tribute to Ida Presti and if you're a classical guitarist and you somehow against all odds don't know her work ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBMlbghnXSw

Olivier Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSVu1zbF94&t=94s

I've written in the past about how one of the substantial shortfalls of Francis Schaeffer's "Christian worldview" narrative is that he has the reader assume (with him) that once the Christian worldview is cast aside music gets weird and ugly and that basically explains the Western European and American avant garde movements.

Nope. Great big nope.

If anything the fact that some of the farthest out composers of the last century were Catholic (like Messiaen) or Russian Orthodox (like Stravinsky, later in life if not always in his fiery youth) makes it hard to make any one to one correlation between a nebulously defined "Christian worldview" and whether or not a person was in the artistic avant garde.  Someone could be thoroughly parochial in matters of religion and innovative at a formal level in the arts.  If anything Stravinsky and T. S. Eliot made that easy to establish in the decades before Schaeffer began his trilogy.

The Intermede could sound pretty cool on a classical guitar if ... you know ... somewhere were to try transcribing it.  Not that you should, though.  Still, sometimes a guitarist can dream that Messiaen ever wrote for the guitar.  Meanwhile, if you want some 20th century French guitar music Poulenc did write that Sarabande.

which gets me thinking ...

William Byrd: Mass for 5 voices with a read-along score but it's chock-full of C clefs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo3GYkAgylQ&list=PLLFbvhG5ORfCXXyYJJaTB5vTLiZypHFp1

Can't resist noting that even though the Kyrie is scored throughout in common time you could take the Christe eleison section (which starts at 0:34) and plausibly score most of that in 7/2.  I'm completely serious.  Anyone who tries to sell you on the idea that assymetric meter or assymetric phrase lengths was somehow a 20th century or "modern" development doesn't know nearly enough music or music history.   Just because it's scored one way doesn't mean that's what's going on in the music itself.  I've found it easier to score works in common time when the real divisions of meter and pulse included shifts from 4/4 through 4/8 with steady telescoping of riffs. 

Apart from that little observation the music/score read along video is presented without comment.

I love Byrd's music.  I did say I was going to try to get around to music more West than East to keep some variety going.

Ah, right, the playlist doesn't go in a straight line for the work.

Gloria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adqkpCgkrIE

Credo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgN4h3J_ZJs

Agnus Dei
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duuTB6HG2n4

Nobody has the Sanctus/Benedictus up in score form ... or if you want to just barrel through the whole thing in one go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZSB0WTyIrg

a variation on "if I had a million dollars"

Person 1:  When I was a kid I used to have a fantasy that if I had a million dollars I’d live in a mansion with wide hallways where everyone could travel around in electric go-carts

 

Person 2:  … that sounds like a retirement home.

 

somewhat "old" news but the creator of Ren & Stimpy added to the list of people accused of misconduct

A couple of years back we had ourselves a little blog post observing the 25th anniversary of a cartoon I never really got into but that people I know really loved when it was on air, Ren & Stimpy.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/03/another-milestone-25-years-ago-ren.html

Well ... this year ...  somebody got added to the era of #MeToo and allegations of sexual misconduct.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/03/29/ren-stimpy-creator-john-kricfalusi-accused-preying-teens/471530002/

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-entertainment-news-updates-2018-ren-stimpy-creator-john-kricfalusi-1522442428-htmlstory.html

Not much by way of further news since the report broke. 

an Atlantic article on the black vs white inheritance gap is a reminder that another minority couldn't even legally have its own probate processes until as recently as 2004

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/07/black-white-wealth-gap-inheritance/565640/

 

The numbers are staggering: White Americans with a college degree are on average three times as wealthy as black Americans with the same credential, and in families where the head of the household is employed, white families have 10 times the wealth of black ones. One estimate on the conservative end suggested that this wealth gap could take two centuries to close.

 

And the thing about wealth, says Tatjana Meschede, a researcher at the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University, is that it’s “sticky”: It tends to stay with a family. That has serious repercussions for how much money people accumulate over the course of their lives, regardless of whether they attend college—something that is usually thought to make a significant difference financially.
 
A forthcoming study from Meschede and Joanna Taylor, also a researcher at Brandeis, in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, makes the point clearly. Building on a 2017 study of theirs that examined wealth accumulation among college graduates—as well as “intergenerational financial transfers,” like when a parent helps a recent college grad out with rent, or, say, gives her $1,000 a month to spend on whatever she pleases—the two looked specifically at how family inheritances, which are usually larger and tend to come all at once, factor into building and maintaining wealth.
 
The two researchers focused specifically on inheritances among families where at least one parent has a college degree. They looked at families like this in order to test the notion that higher education is some great equalizer.

and a no-prize goes to people who find the very idea dubious but ...

The differences that they found between black and white families were stark. “Among college-educated black families, about 13 percent get an inheritance of more than $10,000, as opposed to about 41 percent of white, college-educated families,” Taylor said in a release announcing the new research. More specifically, on average, white families that receive such an inheritance receive over $150,000 from the previous generation, whereas that figure is under $40,000 for black families.

Meschede and Taylor focused on inheritances of more than $10,000 because, they say, these qualify as “transformative” assets—meaning, they could significantly alter the course of a life. As Mark Huelsman, a policy analyst at Demos, an advocacy group, tweeted earlier this week after seeing Meschede and Taylor’s study, “the average family inheritance to a white college grad can pay off the average undergrad debt balance”—more than $30,000—“and have enough left over for a 20 percent down [payment] on a $575,000 home.” (And that’s if they have student debt to begin with.)


That head start on wealth provides lifelong momentum, Taylor told me in an interview. The median wealth held by black families with a college degree and student loans by the time the head of household is 65 years old, she said, is about $61,000, versus roughly $422,000 for white families under the same circumstances.

Getting a college degree can, in some cases, help close the income gap—as in, annual earnings—and, as I have written, can do wonders for socioeconomic mobility. But the enduring legacy of slavery, and centuries of de jure and de facto segregation have led to a wealth gap that is practically insurmountable. As my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in 2014, the wealth gap “puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution.”


There have been proposals, including systems of reparations such as baby bonds for black families that are scaled to family wealth, to get kids started on an equal level. Those ideas seem to be on the right track—a college degree alone certainly can’t make up the difference.

The topic of inheritance and racial inequality can be more broad-ranging than just whtie and black.  I am still not really convinced by Coates' arguments for reparations.  Adolph Reed's argument against Coates' argument seems too compelling to me. 

For that matter, as I've written in the past, making the issue of race as black and white or white and black as some contemporary journalists make it can produce more heat than light.

Merely giving non-whites education by itself may do nothing.  To flip the script a bit, and having skimmed through Richard Reeves book about "dream hoarders", if higher education is as racist in its legacies as some believe it is ... what if we abolish legacy admissions?

Just abolish legacy admissions across the board. Here's an ee

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/06/opinion/college-legacy-admissions-affirmative-action-for-whites.html

 To the Editor:
Re “U.S. Rights Unit Shifts to Study Antiwhite Bias” (front page, Aug. 2):


With the Justice Department moving to challenge affirmative action in college admissions, we would do well to be mindful of important ways in which existing class and financial status benefit certain college applicants, mostly those who are white.

 

The simple truth is that prosperous communities, good schools and savvy guidance counselors constitute affirmative action for whites.

 

There is also one deliberate and robust admissions policy used at many colleges that in effect constitutes white affirmative action: That is the preference given in admissions decisions to the children of alumni of the college.

 

In a previous life, I was an admissions officer at Princeton. That college and others like it openly acknowledged that there was a separate pool for so-called legacies. That remains true today.

 

Being a legacy was no guarantee of admission. All the legacies I saw admitted were notably successful high school students and were fully capable of succeeding at a demanding college. But a significant percentage of the class was reserved for these legacies. I would say 5 to 10 percent of the admitted students were legacies who would not otherwise have been admitted.

 

This legacy pool has been — and remains — overwhelmingly white. It will remain so for years until the race and ethnicity of college graduates more accurately reflect those of the overall population.

Today the Justice Department would have us believe that whites face reverse discrimination in college admissions. But legacy admissions are just one example of the ways in which the college-admission competition to this day tilts white.

 

T. H. RAWLS, MONKTON, VT.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/higher-education-s-biggest-scam-legacy-admissions-policies-ncna812116

 

 

Not everyone agrees, of course and some make the case that the upper middle class is not really hoarding the American dream by way of legacy admissions.

 
Is the upper middle class really hoarding the American Dream?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-the-upper-middle-class-really-hoarding-the-american-dream/2017/07/16/e894ef88-68b3-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html?utm_term=.74243fe572e1

 

With a title like that you could work out that the answer is going to be "no" simply on the basis of a convention that indicates that rhetorical questions are the refuge of a particular flavor of combative editorializing.

.... Contrary to Reeves’s argument — but included in his book — is one study finding that among children born into the richest fifth, only 37 percent remained there as adults. Roughly two-thirds dropped out. How much more downward mobility does Reeves want? He doesn’t say.

Similarly, some advantages claimed for the upper middle class are weaker than advertised. Access to the best schools? Sure, but that doesn’t cover all upper-middle-class students. Reeves reports that nearly two-fifths of the richest 20 percent of families live near schools ranked in the top fifth of their states by test scores. But that means that about three-fifths of these wealthier families don’t. It’s also true, as Reeves notes, that the causation works in the other direction: Good students make good schools.

...
 

It's not really much of a case for not getting rid of legacy admissions to me.  Saying that we should expand the upper middle class rather than restrict it seems silly.  What we should try to do is recover some kind of economic viability for people who do not have and will never get a college degree.  The very idea of making American higher education as it has developed in the last forty years into the solution for income inequality will exacerbate rathe rthan address that problem.

But, on the matter of inheritance and legacy .... having an inheritance by way of land or assets is not a foregone conclusion across all ethnic groups in the last fifty years of the United States.  Ever hear of the American Indian Probate Reform Acts?  No.  It dates to ... 2004.  Yes, this millennium, this century. 

American Indians couldn't even set up their own probate processes for a long time.  Even when discussing the difference between what whites and blacks could receive by way of inheritance it's possible to skim over every other respective color group on the spectrum along the way. 
 

https://www.doi.gov/ost/trust_reform/Probating-Trust-Assets

 

Probating Trust Assets

The American Indian Probate Reform Act of 2004 (AIPRA), which amended the Indian Land Consolidation Act (ILCA), was enacted on October 27, 2004. AIPRA created a nationwide Indian probate code and changed the way trust estates are distributed to heirs. AIPRA may affect ownership rights in trust or restricted land, except for land located in Alaska.

• AIPRA Public Law 108-374, March 2005
• AIPRA Brochure, PL 108-374

 

 

http://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/understanding.htm

 

Understanding the American Indian Probate Reform Act of 2004

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
The American Indian Probate Reform Act of 2004 (AIPRA) was enacted on October 27, 2004. The Act amends the Indian Land Consolidation Act and amendments made in 2000 and this notice replaces the notice provided in 2001. This Act affects your ownership rights in trust or restricted land, unless the land is located in Alaska. Most of the provisions do not take effect for one (1) year.


AIPRA changes the way trust estates are distributed to your heirs after your death. This increases the importance and benefits of writing a will or doing an estate plan. AIPRA also improves your ability to consolidate your interests in trust or restricted land.
...

You can read more at your leisure.  As I've written about before, one of the reasons I didn't find Coates' case for reparations ultimately persuasive is because as inheritance goes American Indians were functionally barred from being able to create wills or establishing probate processes to give their children inheritance for the bulk of a century.  Institutionalized racism and white supremacy did not play out the same way across the board.  Slaves, regarded as property, were subjected to enforced breeding.  Native Americans were subjected to sterilization projects and massacre.  In that sense one of the groups was kept alive as property while another group was regarded as needing to be cleansed from the land.  It's not that the legacy of racism stopped being horrendous, it's that the kinds of arguments a Coates makes for reparations seem trapped within the logic of the evil, as Adolph Reed put it--it doesn't follow that the nature of the evil has to be given a response within the terms set by the evil.  That's an argument I find persuasive, particularly since the last century and a half had the Supreme Court and Congress working to very literally disinherit Native American groups. 

Alois Hába, String Quartet No. 5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFBTCeGrvos

Woot!

I've been on a microtonalist kick in the last year or three.  I've blogged relatively in passing bout Ben Johnston's string quartets, which started off pretty good in quartets 1 through 3 and went to fantastic from 4 to 10.  For the first two thirds of the 20th century literature I'm an admirer of Bartok and Shostakovich first and foremost, and then I dig string quartets by Hindemith and Villa-Lobos as sort of the second-order string quartet awesome.  But ...

I've been listening to the Haba quartets lately and they intrigue me.  I still don't have any plans to be a microtonal composer myself but I find a lot of beauty in a selection of microtonal composition. 

And the sheer size of the microtonal repertoire is another reminder why I couldn't even begin to buy a number of Andrew Durkin's probably well-intentioned but ultimately lazy canards about the fuzziness of Western musical notation.  Sure, everyone knows it has limits, but when composers can write more than a dozen string quartets after breaking out of the constraint of the equal-tempered chromatic scale and those quartets can get recorded a few times (the composer who's the subject of this post) breezy claims that Western notation is kind of vague or imprecise seems itself a vague and imprecise claim.

Bruce Haynes has a book wherein he says earlier music theorists would say that a musical score is to music as a recipe is to a culinary experience.  You don't eat the recipe, you use the recipe to cook something delicious. 

Which is another opportunity to suggest that a lot of battles in musicology seem to be over the legacy of German idealism ... and maybe not even the legacy of German idealism across the board (because it's a mind-bendingly large range of literature) but the prosaic and provincial applications of those ideas and associated literary and artistic canons as mediated by Anglo-American scholars. 

Or as Alex Ross suggested, there's a point at which we might want to ask whether the racism we see and hear in Wagner's operas is partly really there and yet even more a reflection of the racisms of our own time.  Ross has a book about Wagnerism in the works and I'm curious to read it when it finally comes out. 

But, as usual, I digress. 

Well, let me digress some more.  As bad as people may feel the German legacy is I don't think it holds a candle to the actual imperialism of the British empire or the United States.  Germany was the nation that wasn't even a nation until relatively recently, quite a few years after even the United States emerged, let alone England.  Germany was also the nation that lost both "world" wars 1 & 2.  So ... in a way ... if we want to complain about cultural imperialism we might be better off complaining about British and American imperialism ... but that's perhaps my Native American side choosing to be an impudent sort for a moment.

Anyway ... hope you enjoy the string quartet and if not, well, no harm no foul. 

Antonio Jose - Sonata for Guitar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy7qzY0rO74

I am definitely planning on blogging about this sonata!  As much as I like and admire the Ponce guitar sonatas I often like this one more. 

Obviously I'm trying to bite off too much to chew, so to speak.  You can't just blog about a guitar sonata like this one, which is one of the more remarkable sonatas written for the instrument.  But it's one of the ones I hope to get to at some point in the next few years.   I'm partial to Marcin Dylla's recording of this work (who is such a great guitarist he's gotten me to enjoy the Ginastera guitar sonata which I have always hated and still kind of hate if anyone but a guitarist at his level is playing it!).  As in a few earlier cases, BC has posted a score-video, and so we're linking to it for educational purposes. 

A more in-depth discussion of Jose's sonata is in order but you regular readers already know how overdue I am to get back to blogging about Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues. 

Grażyna Bacewicz string quartets performed by the Silesian Quartet

If, like me, you're the least bit into string quartets and also have some appreciation for Polish music then the string quartets of Grazyna Bacewicz are quartets you should check out.  I've been listening to her quartets over the last month or so.  First heard of her work through the blogging/reviewing of Norman Lebrecht.  He may be a crankypants about any number of things but this tip is a fun one to follow.  And there's a handful of reviews to peruse at your leisure.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/21/silesian-quartet-grazyna-bacewicz-string-quartets-cd-review

https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/bacewicz-string-quartets

As for a recent recording, that's something you can sample over here at Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnUuQSULc-s&list=PLySjaK0qeqpN9bvPKHv81zo6E4Ad1czql

Bacewicz is one of the composers mentioned in the book Composing the Party Line, which I haven't been reading through as quickly as I thought because I'm distracted by a bunch of other reading.  But her work is a useful case study for demonstrating the gap between Cold War myths about how repressive the Soviet bloc was in contrast to Western musical scenes.  A repressive communist regime isn't necessarily going to be repressive all across the board.  Socialist Realism was more or less a dead letter by 1953-1955, as the aforementioned monograph discusses in early chapters. 

But I can write about that some more after I finish the book. 

scientists analyze 6,147 movie scripts and the emotional arc that makes the most money is called the "man in a hole" arc

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jul/24/uk-scientists-uncover-formula-box-office-movie-success

A team of UK scientists believe they have found the formula for box office success.
After analysing data from 6,147 movie scripts and filtering it through a series of algorithms, the researchers have identified the emotional arc that makes the most money, called the “man in a hole” arc.
It could be gamechanging for both film producers and audiences, said Ganna Pogrebna, a professor of behavioural economics and data science at the University of Birmingham, who led the research team. “We know that when we talk about movie production it is a small group of people that make decisions for the viewers. We were essentially trying to listen to the viewer, to see what they actually want.”
The scientists categorised the movies according to six emotional profiles or clusters, which were previously applied to novels.

Ah, so one of the most literal iterations of "man in a hole" storytelling, The Dark Knight Rises, made at least a little bit of money.  For folks who want to see the study looks like it's over here

https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.02221

Rick & Morty's Dan Harmon gets some headlines for an ill-advised skit brought back to the spotlight ... which gives me an occasion to briefly discuss why Rick & Morty seems overhyped

While I'd venture to say the most over-hyped and over-discussed prestige TV shows in live-action in the last eight years would be Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead then if I had to pick animated shows that I think are competently made but overhyped relative to their merits Rick & Morty is probably one of the more overhyped animated shows that's come out in the last few years.

https://www.cbr.com/rick-and-morty-dan-harmon-departs-twitter/

https://www.cbr.com/adult-swim-dan-harmon-response/

Which is not to say I didn't find "Lawnmower Dog" really, really funny. 

But why on earth anyone would think of Rick as anything but a sorcerer-thug rather than the trite "smartest guy in the room" super-scientist eludes me.  There's no good way Rick can know something about the anatomy of a girl Morty has a crush on in season 1. 

I've managed to catch up to the end of season 3 of the show thanks to library DVDs and the show seems overhyped.  I' enough of an animation fan I try to catch some things if enough friends mention things.  Or I may get around to something that never got a local release, like the French language adventure tale The Long Way North.  I try to keep at least some tabs on French language animation, too, so I own Persepolis, The Long Way North, and thanks to some younger relatives am now relatively up to speed on Ladybug & Cat Noir.

So when I say Rick & Morty seems overhyped it's because it seems overhyped to me. Rick may be a blunt atheist who insists no gods exists and that science is the way to go but he's not a scientist.  Traveling across dimensions on adventures is something Doctor Strange can do, with magic.  To touch upon another Adult Swim cartoon that's been around longer, The Venture Bros has a sad sack divorced Doctor Strange homage in the form of Byron Orpheus whose wife left him for another man and who is raising his daughter by himself.  Orpheus and Rick Sanchez differ in the formal means of breaking the laws of physics.  One uses magic and the other uses "science" but both old guys are magicians. 

I don't tend to watch a lot of Adult Swim as it is.  The last time I tuned into Adult Swim content was for the glorious return of Samurai Jack and keeping up with The Venture Bros.

Now season 3 of Rick & Morty introduced the idea that the alcoholic, verbally abusive title character may not be a villain but he shouldn't be anyone's hero.  But given the way the second season ended ,with Rick handing himself over to authorities and confessing that he was guilty of doing "everything" to cops because he felt he would do better by his daughter rand her family turning himself in, there was no real reason to have a season 3.  Rick figured out how bad he was and gave himself up to be imprisoned.

But the thing about a show created by guys who used to work on Futurama, perhaps, is that there's gotta be a "psyche!" and a rug-pull.  It has to transpire that Rick did everything because he knew he would be imprisoned in a particular facility at which he could stage a coup to dismantle a governing organization he disliked. 

That's how TV works in comedic terms, you can't have something "bigh" happen without themeans to immediately or eventually reverse it so the status quo can be established.

There are long-form arcs in place if you've seen the show.  The rise of evil Morty as the monster who embodies Rick's vices is still incubating. Whether or not the show lasts long enough to see that plotline through remains to be seen. 

The Cernovich catalyst for the James Gunn headline (fired from Disney, thus not looking to be working on Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3) may or may not be connected to what's happened with Harmon.  At CBR there are probably a few comments about how the right is focusing on sexual content without objecting to violence.  Possibly ... although there's a sense in which all of these sorts of things could be construed as a witch hunt ...

but can it be a witch hunt if people don't lose their jobs?  Harmon and company are still probably on track to make a season 4 for Rick & Morty while James Gunn has been fired fired. 

Rick is basically a depraved old wizard with a god complex and while he's presented as someone who shouldn't be your hero the writers by and large can't bring themselves to present hi as villainous on the one hand or as a tragic figure or as an antihero because, to keep thing simple, that's not how comedies work.  By necessity of the genre whatever Rick does has to not ultimately impact things. 

In season 1 Morty tells his sister Summer that nobody exists on purpose and things don't necessarily happen for reasons and to come watch TV.  There may be people who find that deep or insightful but that's not only more or less a nihilistic take on the human condition ...

it's also, arguably, othe kind of materialistic skepticism that is the luxury of moderately formally educated white guys. 

If there's an element of seriousness in criticisms of white privilege or white male privilege it could be applied to people who can write shows on the order of Rick & Morty.   It's not like the show presents women in the most positive or complementary light.  Sure, if you cast Sarah Chalke as Rick's desperately emotionally estranged daughter Beth then you've cast someone who has spent her career honing characters who say and do self-destructive things without realizing it.  Her lines as Beth to Summer (Beth's daughter) were the most memorable parts of season 3.  Summer asks "Mom, am I hot?" to which Beth replies that that's not a category she thinks about for her because she's her mother and then, finally, "Summer, I'm you're mother, not an issue of Cosmo. It's not my job to say whether you're `hot'."

But Beth takes after her father, sneering contemptuously at anyone who she thinks isn't as smart as she is in professional fields.  She's also taking up her father's approach to alcohol while her children are aghast that she decides to divorce her husband Jerry (Chris Parnell, playing Cyril in another context) because she won't, as the old saying goes, leave and cleave on the marriage thing.  But by the end of season 3 Beth has somewhat implausibly changed her mind and decided she'd like her family back together and is apparently not going to complete the divorce process.  What makes it implausible is not just the mechanics of how the final episode was written but that nature of the season 3 opening ultimatum and Beth's response.  Jerry and Beth were presented through the two previous seasons as frustrated by each other but committed to each other; it may be that unplanned teen pregnancy led to Summer being born and the two kids getting married but Rick's resentment that Jerry ruined his daughter's chances at being a scientist are offset by the way that Beth, with all her vices, seems to in some ways like being a wife and mother.  Rick views marriage and the allures of erotic attachment mainly with contempt and tells Morty he should be into science. 

Not that Rick ever actually talks about science.  He keeps using his portal gun and tech to travel to other dimensions and alternate universes to have adventures.  I'm told that a fan anti-favorite from season 3 was an episode in which a psychologist is counseling the Sanchez family and explains to Rick and his daughter Beth and her children Summer and Morty that there's nothing adventurous about the maintenance work of relationships or daily life.  It's not an adventure to wipe your butt and wash your hands after you take a dump and the work required to cultivate and sustain interpersonal relationships and a stable role in society is more or less the same way.  Rick and his daughter Beth view that kind of work with contempt whereas Beth's kids (Rick's grandkids) aspire to those things. So does Jerry, and that is where there's a probably insoluable double standard in Rick & Morty as a show. They can't condone Jerry because, dude, he's voiced by Rick Parnell.  Jerry has to be the stupid conformist "normal" person that Rick resents as too stupid to ever be Rick.  But the writing does not go very far in showing how it's equally true that Jerry is the only one of the formally adult people in the show who IS willing to do the boring custodial work of cultivating and sustaining relationships.  If Morty has anything like a working moral compass (not that he does but if he did ... ) he got it from Jerry rather than Beth or, least of all, his grandpa Rick.

That may all seem abstract or fuzzy as a frame in which to discuss recent headlines about Harmon, but I'm suggesting that it's a fairly natural set of connections.  If Harmon thought that satirizing Dexter by inventing a guy who is supposed to prevent serial killers from killing by going back in time to sexually molest them as babies would be funny it's not clear why it should be funny, even if we grant the viability of a joke at the expense of a show like Dexter where a serial killer focuses on hunting down other serial killers.  I never watched the show.  I don't plan to. 

Now maybe the right-wing types who are incensed about this kind of humor just never watched Adult Swim anything. Maybe they haven't seen how consistently sexual humor and often of a deliberately overboard style permeates AS programming, whether Rick & Morty or Robot Chicken.

I'm not sure I care that the forces at working in bringing Harmon's skit back into the spotlight are described as far right or alt right.  For all we don't know these days there's enough depraved humor and conduct across the entire spectrum that double standards as to who gets to get away with saying or doing what seems moot. 

I admit to having never joined Twitter and having little to no interest in Twitter.  It seems that it's best to never be on Twitter than to say something for the record that you can't escape.  If James Gunn had never even been on Twitter to begin with would he have been fired?  Probably not? 

With this blog's history and range of focus I can tell you that back when mars Hill PR was trying to keep a lid on things with the Andrew disciplinary situation it was precisely through Noriega twitter feeds that I managed to connect enough dots to establish that Andrew Lamb was connected to the Noriega family at the Ballard campus of Mars Hill by dint of blogs by James Noriega and his stepdaughter's blog, as well as James Noriega's Twitter feed.  Why?  Because having attended the church for years and having been connected in some way or other to the church scene for a decade I knew this was a community o people that used social media prolifically.  The first person industrial complex content was strong at Mars Hill.  In short, I knew that the odds were pretty high that the people that MH PR said were needing privacy protected might have actually spilled the beans on social media with enough information to establish who, what, where, when and why months before Andrew Lamb's disciplinary situation garnered national headlines. I turned out to be right.  You can't call it doxxing if everything is already on the internet as a matter of public record, let alone if the information was volunteered by parties when they got interviewed by the Seattle P I or Mars Hill people.  But we live in an era that, as Terry Teachout has put it, has people struggling to have their practice catch up with the reality of consequences in social media use.

Since I think Rick & Morty should have ended at the close of season 2 I'm not going to feel heartbroken if the show doesn't come back for a while.  The way the show got from the end of season 2 to the start of season 3 was how I figured it was going to go, it amounts to psyche! 

Which is why the end o season 2 felt like a cheap con as it was.  Playing the pre-Cash version of "Hurt" as Rick turns himself in wasn't pathos so much as bathos.  It wasn't the kind of "moment" that could last if the show went on to have a season 3.  If, however, the series had ended then it would have had some actual weight to the thing. 

But that's not how American TV works.   

In an era in which entertainers get caught having made jokes about pedophilia while having publicly criticized other public figures the question that emerges may be implicit--if it's wrong to do something is it okay to joke about doing it?  If so on what basis is it okay to make jokes about things that, if done, would be considered evil?  For those who reject altogether the idea that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks then, well, you could say just about anything and until you do X talking about X doesn't mean anything yet. 

It may be that the gap between public grandstanding on an issue and documentable statements is less easily overlooked in our era.  It could well be that Harmon shouldn't feel any heat for stuff he did a decade ago.  Mark Driscoll had allies in 2014 who were willing to suggest that what he wrote as William Wallace II shouldn't be construed as how he felt in 2014.  That wasn't all there was to the public criticism of Mark Driscoll having written that stuff to begin with.  Again, for people who take seriously the saying that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks what WW2 was ranting about showed us what was in his heart and that gave at least some people reason to wonder how or why this guy was "still" a pastor or, more crucially, was ever thought fit to be a pastor to begin with.  The thing about a pseudonym is that in the age of the internet you cannot assume your identity will never come to light.  If you want to blog try to keep in mind that you're contributing to a mass medium.  Consider that if you put something up it could potentially be up there for "all time".  The more scandals (real or fabricated) come up about how people use Twitter the more it seems that it might be best to be willing to apologize for stuff, to make retractions and make them sooner rather than latter when things blow up.  That's arguably just a solid journalistic convention which may need to be brought back to go by the rarity with which retractions and corrections seem to get attention.

Billboard runs a list of the highest paid professional musicians for the earlier year

https://www.billboard.com/photos/8465835/highest-paid-musicians-money-makers

presented, for the time being (and probably for later), without comment

an Ethan Hein post that I wrote about has gone missing, the one about John Cage

Over the last seven years the various times in which I blogged about something and linked to content that vanished "normally" was something that I quoted in the media archives of Mars Hill, often something published with Mark Driscoll's name attached, that might vanish within days of a commentary I made using statements made in the Driscoll media.  As mark Drsicoll Ministries has kept moving forward some of those sermons reappear but substantially redacted so that large swaths of material I quoted from their originally published forms has been removed.

 

I haven't run into cases most o fthe time in which I reference a blog post on the topic of music that is up one month and gone the next.  But, sometimes, it happens.

 

Here was the blog post I wrote.

 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/07/one-of-ironies-of-john-borstlaps.html

 

This was the blog post I was writing about that is now gone

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2018/john-cage-and-sound-art/

 

This is the cached form of the page.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ESi2RFtE1YMJ:www.ethanhein.com/wp/2018/john-cage-and-sound-art/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

 

or ..

 

http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fwww.ethanhein.com%2fwp%2f2018%2fjohn-cage-and-sound-art%2f&d=5015462702875176&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=gVbqyR5JzE_oxI9wijxf16BWLnScmE5t

 

There was a direction some comments were going in as discussion went along I could sort of appreciate but didn't quite agree with.  Naomi had comments about the latently racist element of Cage's rejection of popular African American musical styles.  Cage was dismissive toward jazz throughout his life.  I am less certain that was indicative of Cage being a racist, not that I can establish that Cage was or wasn't racist because 1) I'm not a big Cage fan and 2) I'm certainly not a Cage scholar.   With those caveats out of the way I am still not convinced that the default mode we should take in criticizing Cage's dismissive views of popular music in general and jazz in particular should be construed through racial narratives.

 

What if, for instance, John Cage was a highbrow snob who disliked popular music because he distrusted commercial music regardless of skin color issues?  Cage could have been a snob who just didn't like pop music.  To put things another way, Cage may not have made it into the canon in his life but to invoke criticisms from Maoists like Cardew it isn't hard to imagine a criticism of Cage proceeding from a question about what class he served.  To be simple about it, Cage may not have disliked pop music because of racial issues but because he was having to cater to or pander to a patronage class and if that class had no use for popular musical styles Cage could ill afford to just declare that anything went, i.e. anything goes so far as using as much popular musical materials as you want. 

 

For instance ... :

 

naomi says:

July 12, 2018 at 4:57 pm

Cage’s rejection of/lack of interest in black/african-diaspora musical traditions is an unfortunate blind spot given his own aesthetic interests. For ex. some of the later Coltrane stuff, such as Meditations & Ascension, or Coleman Free Jazz & so on, is just as rigorously constructed, experimental, & sonically grating (or “disinterested in the listener” or whatever) as anything Cage ever wrote. And Cage was not that invested in the classical music world either, which didn’t take him seriously during his lifetime. But his social circles were very much “high art”, specifically the fine arts—Rauschenberg, Rothko, Pollock, Duchamp et al—and he is taken much more seriously within the fine arts even today (there are drawings by Cage in art galleries around the world). That entire distinction between high and low art and all its latent white supremacy is therefore something he had to cling to to remain part of his community. Which is also unfortunate for musicians & listeners…. a Cage + Ornette collaboration would have been something to hear.

Also that’s fair enough re McClary—I didn’t read this specific article, but it’s a reasonable argument to make. I generally like her work, and appreciate her tireless trolling of the established academy, which has felled many a musicologist who, whilst attempting to retort angrily to her, revealed himself as an inveterate racist or sexist or homophobe et cetera >.>

 

Having linked to an article on sumptuary codes and online debates about cultural appropriation, it's not really a surprise if I suggest that I think what Cage did was more indicative of elitism or class vetting than a white supremacist thing.  High and low distinctions are not that hard to find in non-white cultures.  The caste system in India springs to mind.  For that matter the tiered status categories of pacific Northwest Indians springs to mind.

 

Nor does it seem to hold good that invoking a high low divide in which folk or popular art being distinct from high/classical art applies exclusively to whatever "white" culture is supposed to be.  Traditional Thai music (i.e. "classical" Thai music) can't be construed as defaulting to white supremacist ideology.  Since I've been reading up a bit here and there on Pacific Northwest Native American cultures and practices in the last few years strict rules about who can and can't perform X or Y song, or even hear it, doesn't have to have anything at all to do with latent or even explicit white supremacy.  I find it slightly annoying that contemporary scholarly discourse so swiftly defaults in some circles to assumptions that high/low distinctions might default to white supremacist views.  Maybe in some cases, sure, but the defaults taken up in online discourse have me doubting whether it's good to have such a literally and figuratively black and white set of polarities on these topics.   I'm not sure I buy a number of claims common in what seems to be the new musicology any more than I buy defensive claims made by "modernists" or even "traditionalists".

 

Since I mentioned Pacific Northwest Native American cultures on the topic of songs and who could hear them ...

 

When Dr. Ida Halpern recorded Pacific Northwest tribal songs she could establish that chiefs and others in the tribes owned slaves and could note that Pacific Northwest tribes had some strict rules about who could hear songs and share songs.  It was when the men and women who knew the songs realized the younger generation didn't want to learn the songs and that these songs would die with the generation that knew them that they agreed to work with Halpern to record the songs for posterity.  We can't forget at any step of that process that these were, within tribal terms, people of high status or, if you will, kinds of aristocrats. 

 

The assertion that high and low art has latent white supremacy might make some kind of sense if we only confined ourselves to a particular era of European history but, honestly, I don't take as given that high/low dualisms are latently white supremacist.  There can be dualisms about what music is appropriate to sing in church or a bar and fans of African American music may not need much reminding about how within African American music some music was considered inappropriate to sing for those who sought to spend a lot of time singing in churches.  That hardly means Son House or Charley Patton couldn't (let alone didn't!) record both sacred and secular song.  Breaching previously observed prohibitions about what was and wasn't appropriate to record or perform in the wake of new technological advances in recording and presenting music has been with us for millennia. 

 

It's possible to argue that Cage was too committed as a matter of branding and public relations to taking a low view of popular musical culture as part of catering to his patronage base without simultaneously insisting that this had to indicate racism on Cage's part at an implicit level; it is also not necessary to invoke latent white supremacist views for Cage's patronage base.  Some of them may well have been white supremacists but there are plenty of other ways to find fault with Cage without invoking statements of presumed white supremacism.  Xenakis' complaint about aleatory and indeterminacy was couched in terms of pointing out that your improvisers or going to improvise what they already know.  A Charles Mingus variation might be that you can't improvise on nothing, you're going to improvise on something. 

 

Now I did read the Lewis article Ethan linked to and it was an interesting read.  The definitions for Afrological and Eurological are much narrower and time-specific than online reactions tended to convey.  What sticks with me is that Cage comes across as though he was loathe to call improvisation improvisation as a point of class rather than race but it's a fair question why Cage and his associates seized upon aleatory and indeterminacy when they could have used the term "improvisation".  The arguments that improvisation in jazz was based on permutations of existing lexicons of formal and gestural clichés doesn't convince me.  I enjoy too much Baroque music to buy that kind of line.  Inventively manipulating conventions and received riffs is too central to the entire span of Baroque music for me to see a reason to drop that, and a similar observation can be made about jazz ... but partisans for one or the other style or era can tend to dig down into established critical/scholarly narratives in a way I just don't feel any obligation to do myself. 

 

Cage, however, did seem to find some necessity for using terms like aleatory and indeterminacy rather than improvisation.  Improvisation might be freighted with the baggage of being done within the context of an identifiable style.  Cage and others may have been committed to the old Romantic trope of tearing up the rulebook and figuring things out.  I've never been interested in tearing up rulebooks myself.   

 

The more I study music the more I get the sense that when 19th century pedagogues said what the guidelines were before admonishing students to not feel beholden to the rules there was a scholarly double bind at play.  On the one hand there were rules laid down as to what a good sonata was or what a good fugue was.  The presumption was that whatever Beethoven or Bach did was what was being conveyed ... though at this point jokes about the gap between what 19th century theorists prescribe and what J. S. Bach actually did are too numerous to need to do anything more than allude to.

 

On the other hand, artistic genius was held to be above pedantic rules and the genius was expected to break free of the conventions of scholasticism.  But the 19th century portrait of what musicians in the 18th century did was ... a bit skewed.  The rules that a student might be admonished to break were not necessarily rules that were laid down by 19th century composers or theorists so much as guidelines that emerged from within 19th century pedagogy.  Chopin could write what Hepokoski and Darcy called a Type 2 sonata in his B flat minor sonata and while contemporaries could sniff that he was too beholden to old school norms, didn't some consider the sonata too weird to make sense of it?  But that this "Type 2" sonata was, in fact, pretty normal can be established not just by reference to the famous Chopin sonata, a survey of early 19th century guitar sonatas shows that a Type 2 sonata form could show up as often as a "textbook Type 3 in Hepokoski and Darcy's taxonomy of sonata forms. 

 

Which is a roundabout way of saying that just because a range of scholars and writers think of Cage's disdain toward popular music reflected latent white supremacy is not a reason to consider that the case. If someone can prove from Cage's own writings that he was a white supremacist let them.  At the moment it seems we could propose that Cage was a snob and needed to be one based on the patronage class he needed to appeal to without getting anywhere near the idea that Cage or his patronage base were white supremacist as construed in 21st century scholastic or polemical terms.   

 

For my time and interest Coltrane and Coleman are way, way more fun to listen to than Cage!  Their work marks the end point for me in terms of the jazz I find fun to listen to.  I admire a lot of jazz from Armstrong up to Coltrane and Coleman and after that I, well, I really do like some George Russell stuff into the 1980s and 1990s but I guess I'd say that I couldn't get into Third Stream, Weather Report-type stuff and the Marsalis-type stuff.  If I had to think of some reason why that was it might simply be because by the 1970s and 1980s the boundaries between popular song and jazz as a self-identified art form became as non-negotiable and impermeable as the boundaries between "classical" music and popular song had already been for a generation or two.  A lot of what I love about a composer like Haydn, as I read the scholarship on his work and consider my own enjoyment of his music decade after decade, is that he treated the boundaries between "high" and "low" as more permeable than later theoreticians and music historians seemed willing to do with the rise of German idealism.

 

Which is a very roundabout way of my suggesting that we do a full frontal assault on German idealism rather than just assume that white supremacism is automatically involved. 

 

Cage as the apotheosis of Romantic ideology completely separated from any stereotypically Romantic musical sounds seems easy enough to establish but I figure I've probably written enough on this topic by now.  I don't have any complaints if people have complaints about Cage as composer or Cage as philosopher or Cage as musician but ... I do hope we can go back through contemporary criticisms of Cage to see that there were more ways to critique his work than a riff (however understandable, within a range of perspectives) that would say that Cage's dismissal of jazz reflected the latent white supremacism of "high" and "low". 

 

But then the whole post is gone from Hein's blog, just around the time I was finally getting around to writing some more thoughts about some things I agree and don't agree with about ways to proceed in criticizing Cage's stance on jazz.