Month: February 2023

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60 of 23

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Michael Jordan turned 60 two days ago.

While I’ve slowly come around to the acknowledgement that LeBron James is likely the greatest basketball player of all time, my commitment to MJ as the greatest still holds some sway in my head. The man was incredible, and watching him play when he was just himself was exciting enough. But when he turned it on and played not just as one of the NBA’s best but as MJ, the single best of all time, it was just something to behold. He did things that defied explanation, and then you would watch a slow-mo replay of the astonishing thing he’d just done, and it would somehow become even more astonishing.

There was no need at all for slow-mo in Game One of the 1992 NBA Finals, however. That series pitted Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, who were the defending champs, against the Portland Trailblazers, who featured my personal favorite basketball player ever, Clyde Drexler. As we had lived in Portland several times in earlier years, I rooted for the Blazers in that series…but it became quickly apparent that Jordan wasn’t losing. He took over that first game, and it wasn’t his usual ballet-like progress to the hoop that did it; he just rained in shots from beyond the 3-point line. His dominance became so thorough and inexplicable that at one point he turned to the sideline and shrugged as if to say, “I don’t get this, either.” I don’t think LeBron at the height of his powers could have beaten Michael Jordan that night.

Anyway, MJ is now 60. He only retired 20 seasons ago, in 2003–that was his second and final retirement, having retired previously in 1993 after winning three consecutive NBA titles and wanting to go play baseball. Which he did, spending two years being a big draw in the minors as a Chicago White Sox prospect. In his absence from the NBA the Houston Rockets won back-to-back NBA championships, led by their superstar player at the time, Hakeem Olajuwon, who had been the first pick overall in the 1984 NBA Draft. The third pick that year? Michael Jordan, to the Bulls. (The number two pick, Sam Bowie, might have been great had injuries not affected his career.) After two seasons of baseball, MJ decided that enough of that was enough, and he returned to the NBA and the Bulls, where he picked up right where he left off and won three more consecutive championships.

I’ve always had a bit of trouble with basketball as a spectator, owing to my constant feeling of having missed something amazing and then having this be borne out when I watch the replays. Basketball is a game that looks better in slow-motion to me, which keeps it generally at arm’s length. (Also, I am terrible at playing it, because an eye doctor once informed me that my depth perception isn’t the best, which is not what you want when you’re shooting baskets.) MJ, however, was always worth watching.

 

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“I will seek not the shadowy region”

In her review of a new movie about Emily Bronte, titled Emily, Sheila O’Malley cites two lines from one of Bronte’s poems:

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide.

Somehow I’d never seen that poem before, so I tracked it down. Didn’t take long: I have it in several anthologies. Here it is, in full:

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

I find myself returning, time and again, to the English Romantics and their ability to create deeply evocative and specific visions and feelings with a relative economy of words. “Grey flocks in ferny glens” conjures such a perfectly precise image in my mind in just five words, and the last stanza seems a perfect encapsulation of the smallness of the single human in the face of universal nature.

 

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Closing a few tabs….

It’s that time again:

::  Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes and commitment to reclusiveness fame is returning to bookstores as the illustrator, along with caricaturist John Kascht, of a new book. Wow.

::  Harrison Ford gives a very insightful interview:

I think it’s the place I feel most useful. It’s what I know the most about. I lost my chops as a carpenter. I haven’t ever played fiddle. But I feel comfortable wrestling with how to make behavior out of words on a page and tell a story, and I’m still excited about the prospect of telling a story. I think this is a service occupation — telling stories. We need it. Whether it’s drawing on caves or religious tenets, we love telling stories.

::  On the Year of the Rabbit.

::  Via Roger:

(original)

::  When The Onion decides it’s not taking prisoners, the results can be brutal. Perhaps it helps to understand the context of this from the days preceding it–the New York Times‘s insistence on platforming anti-trans voices with little questioning, the response in the form of an open letter signed by many (including myself), and the Times‘s pouting response to that, followed by their running an appalling op-ed titled “In Defense of JK Rowling”–is best found on one’s own. Meanwhile, The Onion opens fire:

“Quentin” is a 14-year-old assigned female at birth who now identifies as male against the wishes of his parents. His transition was supported by one of his unmarried teachers, who is not a virgin. He stole his parents’ car and drove to the hospital, where a doctor immediately began performing top surgery on him. Afterward, driving home drunk from the hospital, Quentin became suicidally depressed, and he wonders now, homeless and ridden with gonorrhea, if transitioning was a mistake.

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.

Youch.

 

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Something for Thursday

In the 1940s and 50s, there were quite a few Black singing quartets recording music. Many early Black solo artists got their start in groups like this (Sam Cooke being a prime example), but I’ve just learned something very interesting about these groups and their role in Black music history. One of these groups was called The Jubalaires, and apparently their style relied less on gorgeous harmonies and vocal work and more on rhythm and a singing style that was at times a blend of singing and speaking.

In other words, The Jubalaires were a very real precursor to what we know today as rap. And this song, “Noah”, has been called the very first recorded rap song. I don’t have the historical chops to assess that claim, but how fascinating! It’s a really neat listen, I must admit, as someone who knows very, very little about rap.

 

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Hey! Need some love music?

I made a playlist of love songs! 50 songs, 3 hours of music!

(Now, I originally conceived this little exercise as a playlist for our wedding reception if The Wife and I were getting married now, or renewing vows, or just having an anniversary party, which is why there’s one song on here that doesn’t match the theme…well, it kind-of does, if you know some of the history and backstory of the song, but really, it’s just a great dance tune which is why it’s there.)

The playlist has some obvious selections as well as some more obscure stuff, though if you’re a long-time reader here you’ve likely heard most of these. Enjoy!

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Composer Omar Thomas was born in Brooklyn in 1984 to Guyanese parents. He eventually studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and has moved on to a highly praised career as a composer. While he is mainly known as a jazz musician, he has not allowed genre to bind him, as we here in this work, which blends the classical and jazz idioms in a work that sounds at times like a primal scream against a world filled with racist violence and at others like an affirmation of a world that many are trying to fill with grace and forgiveness.

The impetus for Of Our New Day Begun was the attack by a white supremacist on Emanual African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, in which nine people were shot dead.

In Thomas’s own words:

“Of Our New Day Begun” was written to honor nine beautiful souls who lost their lives to a callous act of hatred and domestic terrorism on the evening of June 17, 2015 while worshipping in their beloved sanctuary, the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (affectionately referred to as “Mother Emanuel”) in Charleston, South Carolina. My greatest challenge in creating this work was walking the line between reverence for the victims and their families, and honoring my strong, bitter feelings towards both the perpetrator and the segments of our society that continue to create people like him. I realized that the most powerful musical expression I could offer incorporated elements from both sides of that line – embracing my pain and anger while being moved by the displays of grace and forgiveness demonstrated by the victims’ families.

Historically, black Americans have, in great number, turned to the church to find refuge and grounding in the most trying of times. Thus, the musical themes and ideas for “Of Our New Day Begun” are rooted in the Black American church tradition. The piece is anchored by James and John Johnson’s time-honored song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (known endearingly as the “Negro National Anthem”), and peppered with blues harmonies and melodies. Singing, stomping, and clapping are also prominent features of this work, as they have always been a mainstay of black music traditions, and the inclusion of the tambourine in these sections is a direct nod to black worship services.

The work’s ending is particularly fascinating to me. The piece feels like it is coming to a slow, meditative, and even peaceful conclusion…but then something new stirs in the band, starting with a rhythm emerging softly from the percussion, a rhythm that is a blend of march and waltz, and the entire band fills the hall with sound again. It feels like a rejection of the expected peaceful acceptance of the world in favor of a defiant facing of that world head-on.

Here is Of Our New Day Begun, performed by the James Madison University Wind Symphony.

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Starry Night

We’ve had a relative rarity the last few nights: clear skies. This area has been abnormally cloudy the last six weeks or so; we went an absurdly large number of days without seeing the sun, and of course, seeing the moon and stars was also a no-go.

But the clouds have moved on at last–as I write this the sun is setting now–and the other night I got these two photos of the night sky, with my phone. First is my beloved Orion the Hunter, with Canis Major and Sirius visible to his left:

Next I was able to get a shot of the Pleiades star cluster. This photo didn’t turn out super well, but it’s still cool that I walk around with a gizmo that can capture a shot of a star cluster that isn’t very well visible to the naked eye. The Pleiades are the small blob of five stars in the center of the photo.

Here’s what the Pleiades look like in all their glory:

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“A Poet is Not a Jukebox”

A poem by Dudley Randall:

A poet is not a jukebox, so don’t tell me what to write.
I read a dear friend a poem about love, and she said,
“You’re in to that bag now, for whatever it’s worth,
But why don’t you write about the riot in Miami?”

I didn’t write about Miami because I didn’t know about
   Miami.
I’ve been so busy working for the Census, and listening to
   music all night, and making new poems
That I’ve broken my habit of watching TV and reading
   newspapers.
So it wasn’t absence of Black Pride that caused me not to
   write about Miami,
But simple ignorance.

Telling a Black poet what he ought to write
Is like some Commissar of Culture in Russia telling a poet
He’d better write about the new steel furnaces in the
   Novobigorsk region,
Or the heroic feats of Soviet labor in digging the trans-
   Caucausus Canal,
Or the unprecedented achievement of workers in the sugar
   beet industry who exceeded their quota by 400 per cent
   (it was later discovered to be a typist’s error).

Maybe the Russian poet is watching his mother die of
   cancer,
Or is bleeding from an unhappy love affair,
Or is bursting with happiness and wants to sing of wine,
   roses, and nightingales.

I’ll bet that in a hundred years the poems the Russian
   people will read, sing and love
Will be the poems about his mother’s death, his unfaithful
   mistress, or his wine, roses and nightingales,
Not the poems about steel furnaces, the trans-Caucasus
   Canal, or the sugar beet industry.
A poet writes about what he feels, what agitates his heart
   and sets his pen in motion.
Not what some apparatchik dictates, to promote his own
   career or theories.

Yeah, maybe I’ll write about Miami, as I wrote about
   Birmingham.
But it’ll be because I want to write about Miami, not
   because somebody says I ought to.

Yeah, I write about love. What’s wrong with love?
If we had more loving, we’d have more Black babies to
   become Black brothers and sisters and build the Black
   family.

When people love, they bathe with sweet-smelling soap,
   splash their bodies with perfume or cologne,
Shave, and comb their hair, and put on gleaming silken
   garments,
Speak softly and kindly and study their beloved to
   anticipate and satisfy her every desire.
After loving they’re relaxed and happy and friends with all
   the world.
What’s wrong with love, beauty, joy and peace?

If Josephine had given Napoleon more loving, he wouldn’t
   have sown the meadows of Europe with skulls.
If Hitler had been happy in love, he wouldn’t have baked
   people in ovens.
So don’t tell me it’s trivial and a cop-out to write about
   love and not about Miami.

A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.
I repeat, A poet is not a jukebox for someone to shove a
   quarter in his ear and get the tune they want to hear,
Or to pat on the head and call “a good little
   Revolutionary.”
Or to give a Kuumba Liberation Award.

A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.

So don’t tell me what to write.

(Text from African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, Library of America, Kevin Young, ed.)

Dudley Randall (1914-2000) was a poet and also a major figure in Black American publishing. In addition to his own work, he helped to amplify many of the greatest voices in Black American poetry through the publishing house that he founded himself, Broadside Press, which still exists today as half of Broadside Lotus Press (formed when Randall’s company merged with Lotus Press), and through his work and his publishing Randall was an important figure in the Black Arts Movement.

This particular poem’s meaning can be said to apply to all artists, in that artists cannot produce work on demand (or, if they do, the work won’t be as good). But the deeper meaning here seems to be the insistence that Black voices must be made to speak about everything, that Black people must atone for everything, and that generally every Black person be somehow responsible for every act, every incident, every sleight that whites perceive. And through their refusal to accept that responsibility, and their refusal to address all of it–to insist that they are, after all, not a jukebox–they forfeit all claims to have been systematically wronged along with their ancestors.

That’s bad enough, but toward the end it even gets worse: Randall’s argument is that by insisting what he write about, he is deemed unworthy of writing about certain other subjects. This limitation of the poet’s voice, this neutering of a man who wants to write about love but is told he shouldn’t because there’s some other dark topic he should write about instead, is as negative an imposition on a single man’s voice as it is on all the voices of his community.

So let the man write about love, if he wants. Let anyone write about love if they want. Or about the riot in Miami. Just don’t command it of them.

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On “Phneh” and manufactured outrage

So, America’s right-wing has been complaining about an AI chat-bot gizmo the last day or two. Why? Because someone got the idea to hit the AI chat-bot gizmo with a hypothetical situation: there’s a ticking time bomb and when it goes off it will kill millions! But it can be defused by simply calling it a racial slur.

And the AI chat-bot gizmo said, “No.”

Cue the colossal weirdos. Here’s a good and satisfyingly pithy summation of this lunacy.

So much of what passes for “outrage” nowadays is purely manufactured outrage. It’s people not being actually outraged by something outrageous, but rather choosing to be outraged at something they have interpreted through tortured logic into something outrageous.

I have an actual example of this that I remember from my college years.

I was a Philosophy major, and we often delved into some very esoteric topics; and like any group of people studying the esoterica of a given field, we occasionally invented jokes that were probably the extreme version of “You had to be there.” One such bit of philosophy humor came in my Senior year, when I took “Contemporary Analytic Philosophy.” This class was devoted to the Philosophy of Language, as shaped by figures like Bertrand Russell in the early 20th century. Without getting too deep in the weeds here, one issue we discussed was the relationship between words and meaning: do words have inherent meaning, or do they only mean what we decide they mean? Putting this as a thought experiment: Just after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a week old, did the word cat still mean the four-legged beast we all know?

Yeah, I get it. Esoteric stuff. Boring, even, if you’re not a kinda-sorta wannabe 21-year-old intellectual.

But a friend and I decided that there should be a word that has no meaning. None. And not in the sense that “it can mean what you want it to mean!”, like a linguistic wild-card: the word has no meaning. Any time you utter this word, you have expressed no meaning at all. It’s like a linguistic version of the empty set.

The word we coined? Phneh.

We thought this was the funniest thing. We actually spread this around our circle, as only college kids can do. We discussed how even the linguistic representation of Phneh was unable to truly capture the meaninglessness of Phneh, which we illustrated through a notion ripped from Zen: “The finger pointing at Phneh is not Phneh itself.”

Look, you had to be there, OK?

It was all fun and games of the pseudo-intellectual sort until I took a marker, scrawled Phneh on a piece of paper, and stuck it on the bulletin board in the student lounge of the music building.

People would see it and say, “What is that?” And I’d explain the concept. Most people got it and if they didn’t see the goofball 4th-year Philosophy student humor of it, they at least went “Oh, OK” and wandered off, ignoring it.

One guy, however, did not.

This guy got really bothered by Phneh.

Like, really bothered by it.

It just annoyed the shit out of him that I would dare put a piece of paper with a meaningless word up on the bulletin board. So he started tearing it down.

I, of course, seeing an opportunity to take jabs at an easily-annoyed person’s tender spot, kept right on putting our meaningless word back up on the bulletin board, and he kept tearing it down. I figured he’d get bored with the whole thing–by this point the joke had likely well exceeded its sell-by–but not only did he not get bored with his fight against a meaningless word that had literally just been made up a month or two before by a couple of philosophy dweebs, he actually ratcheted it up. He started posting hand-written warnings of his own about the improper use of the bulletin board; then one day he showed up in the lounge with his girlfriend’s laptop (this was 1993, when laptops weren’t anywhere near ubiquitous, so to show up someplace and use one visibly was mostly showing off at that point) to type up a Very Official Memorandum in which he cited some actual shit from some college rulebook someplace about the use of bulletin boards and the required permission needed to post anything at all.

At this point some other folks were starting to think he was making an ass of himself; one person asked, “So unless we have official permission, I can’t post something about a party my housemates and I are hosting next Friday?” or “Do I hafta take down my ‘available for tutoring’ notice?” And he’d offer mealy-mouthed justifications as to why those were OK but Phneh was not. It was plainly obvious that his weird crusade, now being carried out under some kind of quasi-official (at least in his own head) banner, was directed at one thing and one thing only.

Eventually, though, someone asked him the money question. It might have even been me that asked, but I don’t recall, honestly. But someone did ask him: “If it’s a meaningless word, why are you so bothered by it?”

His response: “If it’s meaningless then I can interpret it as being offensive, which means it is offensive.”

That is, as near as I can recall, his verbatim response. And in all honesty, this response just stopped me in my tracks. I’ve never been a good verbal debater; I’m not often quick with a response, especially when the logic I’ve just been offered is so obviously bad that it takes me a bit of time just to wrap my head around the notion that someone has offered up their argument at all, much less processing all the ways it’s bad. All I could manage, when I recovered my wits enough, was to ask, “So…when you encounter something and you don’t know what it means, you first assume it’s ‘offensive’ until you learn otherwise?” He had a mealy-mouthed reply to this that I did not commit to memory.

Later on I related all of this to my former classmate with whom I had coined Phneh in the first place; in the meantime he had left that college to go to another that offered a drama program. When I told him this story, he laughed so hard I thought he was going to fall on the floor. He found the whole thing hysterical, and when he stopped laughing he said, “Why would you voluntarily offend yourself?”

That was really the heart of it, wasn’t it? The guy was offended, obviously. But equally obviously, he wasn’t offended by anything I had said or done, because there was literally no offense to be found there. He had manufactured his offended state, all by himself. All I gave him was the impetus to get offended, but I gave him nothing to be offended about.

So yeah, that was my first experience with manufactured outrage. This guy in college got himself worked into a holy lather that he manufactured out of whole cloth, over a completely meaningless thing that I and a friend had in turn manufactured out of equally whole cloth. The whole episode was one of the weirdest damned things I remember from my college years. I am shaking my head in disbelief as I write this about it. That incident has, as the kids say these days, lived rent-free in my head since 1993.

But that really is what manufactured outrage is, isn’t it? It’s exactly like what all those right-wingers got all upset about last week when a computer program couldn’t be tricked into saying the N-word. It’s amazing how much gets decided, policy-wise, on the basis of manufactured outrage. And not just policy: in his book On Writing, at one point Stephen King discusses all the angry mail he got when an evil character in one of his novels killed a dog. And he’s thinking, “The guy is evil and he does evil things, it’s kind of the whole point of that novel, and also, the guy isn’t real and the dog isn’t real!” (Bad example for me, maybe; for obvious reasons I am now much more sensitive to the fate of fictional dogs.)

So how did the whole Phneh crusade turn out? Well, I guess he won, because ultimately I got bored and moved on to other things and there’s only so much amusement to be gained from poking someone in their sensitive spot, even if the spot is only sensitive because they got up that morning and decided they were sensitive about it. But a few days after the last conversation about all this, the Music Building’s secretary expressed exasperation to me: “I shouldn’t have to field complaints from people about a nonsense word!” As if it was all my fault. (Well…maybe…but anyway) I responded, “Is it people, or is it one person? And you yourself just said it’s a nonsense word, so why are you taking the complaints seriously?” She didn’t have a good answer to that, either. But that’s when I decided to start hanging out someplace else for a while, having decided that maybe I shouldn’t wear out my welcome through use of a word that literally had no meaning.

It’s always worth asking ourselves, though, when we feel our outrage meter rising, “Is this a real thing that I should be getting outraged about?” Because the answer might well be, “No.”

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