Numbers

According to Rolling Stone Magazine, The Eagles' Hotel California is the 311th best song of all time.  That makes it almost but not quite as good as Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine (#309) but 2 better than Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' Tears of a Clown (#313).  

Rolling Stone has updated their list of the 500 best songs.  You might think the definitive music magazine would have a pretty good handle on the best music ever.  But the last time Rolling Stone compiled the list in 2004, Hotel California was Number 49.  Had 5 million more plays on Classic Rock radio made the editorial staff come to their senses this time around?   As testament to advances in taste since the first list was compiled, Tears of a Clown didn't even make the 2004 cut.  Can we at least agree that Bill Withers' 1971 classic is objectively better than Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna, which rose from 404th place in 2004 to only 317th in 2021?  Let's not be hasty.  Ain't No Sunshine had fallen 29 spaces in the intervening years, from 280th place in the earlier ranking.

The top 10 alone reveals the loose nature of what is great according to the magazine.  Hey Jude was 8th on the list in 2004.  In 2021, at number 89, it's not even in the top 3 Beatles' songs.  Two songs in the 2021 top 10 (Missy Elliott's Get Ur Freak On from 2001 and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams from 1977) existed in 2004 but appeared nowhere on the earlier list.  In all, 49 slots in the new list were assumed by songs that were released after the original list was published; 207 songs from the original list were replaced by songs that already existed but were passed over the first time around.  Both lists reinforce the prejudice of the elderly that the quite distant past is top heavy with greatness.  While the newer list is slightly more relaxed about more recent songs, two decades later, the epicenter of greatness has shifted forward from 1971 only to 1977.  Songs appear twice on both lists (e.g., both Bob Dylan and the Byrds' versions of Mr Tambourine Man appear on both the 2004 and the 2021 list) so it’s clear that the category the magazine is ranking is not actually composition but production. 

Given the flux of the rankings, it's worth a ponder: are there 500 songs that belong on any list?   Five hundred of anything is a lot; and a look at some of the titles that made one or the other of the lists (Tiny Dancer, Tears in Heaven, Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone, a song called Springsteen by someone named Eric Church) strongly supports a notion that standards may have been overextended to pad things out.   But looking for songs that didn't make the cut in either year (Nat King Cole's Route 66, Parliament's Knee Deep, Laurie Anderson's O Superman, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the B-52's Give Me Back My Man) you quickly come to the realization that if you are going to take the idea seriously, there aren't enough places on a 500 place list for the greatest songs of all time.   

Granting that the nature of the task is arbitrary, Rolling Stone has taken a canonical approach, updating their criteria to reflect tastes and advancements (and regressions) in the culture, taking care to pander to a variety of sensibilities while ensuring an appropriate diversity in representation of the artists and genres selected.  The cumulative effect is one that could be expected from so prominent an institution: the cultivation of a conventional taste.  

Number 1 this year is Aretha Franklin's Respect-- rising with a bullet from Number 4 in 2004.   I've liked Respect and Aretha Franklin since I first heard the latter belting the former the very year that Rolling Stone was born.  But I find myself bristling at the notion that the Number 1 Best Song of All Time is an actual thing.  What makes a song the best?  Surely it can't just be the one most people like or the one that has made the most money.  Should it be the most technically and musically complex?  Or should it be devastatingly simple?  Should the lyrics be challenging, persuasive, poetic, novel or  should they be immediate, already in your head?  In my experience 'best' is an attribute that has no relevance to the impact a piece of music has in in my life.  As a dabbler in song-making myself on occasion, the best of mine have a strong accidental element to their construction.  If in some parallel universe one of my personal favorites were selected for the Rolling Stone list I don't know whether I'd  recognize it as a personal artistic achievement or as something more akin to winning a lottery.

This summer, I confess I was wrapped up for a bit in the controversy over Sarah Brand's Red Dress.  While most of the discussion around it centered around whether Brand, a Californian working on a Masters of Science in Sociology at Oxford was offering the unconventional tune sincerely or as bait in a cruel and twisted experiment, I was easily won over by the confident originality of it.  I enjoyed the challenge of the listen and found Brand's microtonal performance hitting my ears like honey.  More than once it has infected my brain and inspired me to cogitate on its theme of society's resistance to irrepressible outsiderhood.  It defies ranking, certainly by the likes of Rolling Stone.  Is it a great song?  In my book, maybe.  

Pandering to conventional taste, performatively diversifying while remaining true to the soft rock core on which the institution was built, Rolling Stone presents the list for discussion, in the process padding their content and most importantly generating clicks and selling magazines.  While the list abounds in examples of excellence and includes many of my favorites,  I would say exclusion from it gains a deserving song extra cachet.  

Creeping Solipsism

I realized today re-reading a couple of emails that I seem to have developed severe OCD of the mouth when it comes to business communications.  My sentences seem to end with the assumption that the reader has already forgotten how they started, so I keep repeating words—I shun pronouns and substitutions.   This is a bit extreme but it’s something like this:  Instead of saying “Skippy asked me to bring the book I borrowed from him when I come to visit.”  I say something like  “Skippy asked me to bring the book that I borrowed from Skippy in the past which is currently at my house, so that  when I next come to visit the house that Skippy asked me to visit I also bring Skippy’s book to it, it being the house that belongs to Skippy also that he asked me to visit and I said yes to, i.e., to the visiting question, and I also said yes to the bringing of Skippy’s book when I come to visit question as well.  Thank you.”   

This is yet another example of my dwindling faith in and growing questioning of the givens of social interaction (along with my increasing uncertainty about a growing list of many other previously assumed pillars of reality: the weather, politics, entertainment,  science).  The manifestation of the corrosion of my faith in sacreds and standards is not necessarily always going to be conscious, but on the contrary is more likely these days to be an unconscious organic outgrowth of a crumbled foundation.  To take spelling for instance: once upon a time I was a paragon of the art.  Now I find my writing is prone with errors.  I make mistakes of speed and carelessness like everybody, but more and more it's an excess of care and attention that's the culprit.  It's not that I don't know how to spell a word, but that I find myself second-guessing, and third and fourth and even fifth guessing, and all too frequently as I discover only in retrospect coming down on the wrong side again and again.

It's not as if I'm wrong about the arbitrary nature of orthography and grammar.  In the absence of an authority in whom to place your trust, how do you decide what's right?  I blame authority for my crumbling trust in authority.

By the way, in case I didn't make clear, in my example above, the "he" in the second sentence refers to Skippy.  Not to Truman Capote.

Word of the Day

I've developed a habit of watching a daily youtube vlog in which the proprietor solves the day's New York Times crossword puzzle.  Puzzles debut, courtesy of the app that provides them on my phone, the eve of the day they are dated, so I have done them by the time I watch the vlog.  For me it's painless therapy in a way to watch someone else struggle with a theme or with the idiosyncrasies of a puzzle constructor's clues when my struggle is behind me.  Sometimes it's akin to group therapy for post traumatic stress disorder. The host of the vlog is a slightly faster solver than I am, especially considering he is talking his way through each clue and publicly exposing his strengths and weaknesses to a variously indifferent group of strangers.  He's a much younger fellow, an expatriate who lives in London and I've observed that he has expertise in areas that I lack and vice versa.  Popular culture references that I require every cross for fly off his fingers.  On the other hand, he was flummoxed recently by how a "Latin American spread" could be a "HACIENDA."   He had heard of a hacienda, but "spread" to his way of thinking had nothing at all to do with it; and I admit when he passed up "_ACIENDA" for the 5th time refusing to throw down an H  in the blank until he was sure it could be nothing else,  I was yelling at my screen.  It wasn't until the next day, when he shared a youtube comment someone had posted on the prior day's video explaining the sense that the constructor intended for "spread"-- a sprawling farm or estate-- that he half-heartedly accepted the legitimacy of the clue, although he insisted the usage was in his experience expiring.  This was news to me.

Cogitating a bit on the difference in our perceptions of this sense of "spread", I developed a theory about why the word might have struck a millennial as out-of-date.  Could it have anything to do with the way that student debt has meant that many of his generation are not purchasing homes until much later if at all?  For my generation, by the time we were his age (I assume he's in his early to mid 30's), many more of us were homeowners*.  Many of us had probably ironically referred to our dwellings as "spreads" taking a post modern cue from our parents for whom the concept was familiar from the formerly more ubiquitous genre of the Western, and from whom we'd already overheard the joke when we were youngsters.  Had his generation not been paying attention at their parents' boring get togethers with other parents or, had they, simply by having no opportunity to wield it, let the usage atrophy?

Hours later, I myself encountered a word I'd never heard in a passage from Naomi Klein's 2007 paradigm changer, The Shock Doctrine:

Ajay Kapur, the former head of Citigroup Smith Barney’s global equity strategy group in New York, encourages his clients to invest in his "Plutonomy basket" of stocks, featuring companies like Bulgari, Porsche, Four Seasons and Sotheby’s. "If plutonomy continues, which we think it will, if income inequality is allowed to persist and widen, the plutonomy basket should continue to do very well."

Kapur and colleagues revived an obscure word coined in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, 'plutonomy', for use in a number of bullish reports for upmarket investors circa 2005, highlighting the novelty of the weird effects of unfettered growth in wealth at the very top in contrast to the very bound and constricting prevailing conventions of economy so familiar to the rest of us down here in the trickle down gutter.  One massive financial meltdown later-- that as usual came out of the hides of everyone but the culprits whose amoral greed made it happen-- and the word fell out of favor.  Those papers have been disappeared from the web, but not before they could be recapped by John Sidor at Leadership Thoughts Blog.  The Shock Doctrine for those who may be unfamiliar tells the story of how this lopsided distribution of the planet's wealth wound up in one very small corner of the population-- it was essentially through years of violent application of a particularly religious ideology, the fundamentalist sect of neoliberalism whose pope was Milton Friedman.  Folks of my generation may remember the kindly old elf of capitalism from his Nobel Prize in Economics (the annual vanity prize that economists award to themselves to try to persist the notion that they are actually contributing something valuable to human knowledge) which seemed to entitle him to a best selling book and PBS series, Free to Choose,  in which he pimped the free market to an America as yet reverberating ever more faintly with the more equitable Keynesian effects of FDR's New Deal.  They may not recall how he cut his teeth advising Chile's General Augusto Pinochet on how to combine the brutality of a regime wrested in a violent coup (with the participation of the CIA at the formerly secret urging of Henry "Dr. Kissinger" Kissinger on behalf of Richard Nixon) from the popular and popularly elected socialist Salvador Allende in 1973 with a particularly brutal austerity that ravaged what had been a democratizing Chile for nearly 2 decades.  For Chileans who had wanted Allende and not a Generalissimo, it was hell; for Friedman it was an experiment, and to his mind, a successful one.

Closer to home, Friedman fucked with the rest of us thanks to the aggressive ascension of true believers and useful idiots of both parties, from Reagan, through Clinton, the Bushes and beyond.   With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the painful implementation of neoliberal capitalism  across the globe including in the last remaining communist superpower China, and the defeat of organized labor in the US,  free market capitalism was declared the victor, and history was declared to be over. After 50 solid years of living under this theocracy, I've decided that caring that people get what they need even if they are poor† is for chumps.  Also that I'm a chump. 

Wish I knew who to credit.  Wish I'd thought of it.

~~~~~

* Mentally put scare quotes around the "owner" portion of that word.

† As an undergraduate in a large university at the dawn of the Reagan era, I knew an older fellow, a regular presence in the circle that revolved around a roommate who was vastly more social than me.  Andrew was a bachelor and perpetual auditor of classes who made his living playing piano for the recitals and auditions of instrumentalists in the music school.  While most of us were destined for other places (even though some of us like myself didn't know what we were doing and would never figure it out) he had been there for years and you could be certain would be there years longer, surely drifting in and out of whatever circle of cool people he found himself invited into.  I'll never forget and have long wanted to work into a post a comment he uttered in frustration one day discussing his latest tribulations with some creditor or bureaucracy interrupting his pursuit of a well lived life to grub for money or to place a financial obstacle in front of a modest ambition.  "They won't let you be poor," he said.  He was right.  They won't let you be poor.  To be happily poor in this wretched age is the most beautiful and insane and doomed ambition.

Good Faith, Bad Faith

When some random stranger decides not to get vaccinated against COVID for less than rock solid reasons,  any response that strikes your fancy seems appropriate (even those that are provoked out of less than rock solid motivations).  When the person is not random or a stranger, the question of what is appropriate has to be taken more seriously.  I had occasion to ponder the appropriateness of a response recently when I found myself conversing at an outdoor gathering with the daughter of family friends whom I hadn't seen in a while.  A lot had happened to her since our last conversation-- pregnancy, marriage, conversion to a particularly fiery brand of Christianity.  She first entered our lives fresh from a Russian orphanage when she and her brother were adopted as young children by our friends a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Though she was raised in a very East Coast American urban secular way, the way she spoke about her relationship with Jesus was very reminiscent of the memories I have of my most ancient immigrant female relatives from childhood.  I wanted to ascribe her evangelism to genes, but I remind myself that she and her brother were not infants when they were adopted, so her full throttle embrace of Christianity could well be a rediscovery of what could have been for a very small child who finds herself in a Russian orphanage a necessary wellspring of strength.  Facing the challenges of special circumstances, let alone of young adulthood at the end of history, it was certainly that for her now. 

Always a bit of an unfiltered open book (bless her heart), she brought it up.  She had probed me first, to see if by any luck I was a brother in Christ, and when that turned out not to be the case, to be sure I wasn't too in the pocket of Satan.  Satisfied that I was benign at worst, she confessed to being unvaccinated and explained that it was her decision to trust in Jesus above the vaccine.  She admitted that she was equally afraid of taking the vaccine, given her pregnancy and her distrust of the medical establishment based on some bad experiences with it, and of not taking it.  To her mind, both were equally dangerous propositions, likely to give her and her unborn daughter lethal cases of COVID.  Even so she was determined to forgo the vaccine and let Jesus handle it (she pointed to the sky as she said this).  This was causing her agony as she was getting grief for it from the vaccine friendly world of her parents (my world) as well as from the Jesus centric world of her husband for entertaining doubt about the power of Jesus.

My first instinct when a grown up person is talking to me directly is to outwardly respect their viewpoint  regardless of what's going on with me inwardly.  If I have a relationship or history with the person, especially if it's a younger person, I'm inclined to accept their agency in their own life.  But for some reason it occurred to me that since there was an opening for being reasoned with about the vaccine-- which her obstetrician after all was urging her to take-- I could at least voice support for the safeguard of getting it.  As I debated the wisdom of this, I thought to myself, "what if your words make the difference?"

I wanted to remind her (for she had surely heard everything) that millions of people had taken the vaccine by now, and that it has had demonstrable results in preventing the spread and in diminishing the effects of the virus for those who have contracted the Delta variant of it.  I said, why not get the vaccine and put an end to your agony over it?  She countered that as a person with some rheumatoid arthritis she would have to get periodic booster shots.  What's more there would be other variants-- the spiral of vaccination was potentially never ending.   Better to let Jesus inoculate you for good.   But the Delta variant is much more contagious.  Wasn't she afraid of being around so many unvaccinated people?  Everyone she knew was vaccinated, she said, even her husband who was opposed to it on religious grounds but whose workplace required it.  By her being out on a limb with it, her circle had created a bubble of immunity around her.  But what about those outside her circle in her church?  Weren't they potential sources of the disease that her lack of immunity would make her vulnerable to? She preferred to put her faith in Jesus rather than the vaccine.  Having gone down the road I had to say it: Was that not an unfair burden being placed on Jesus? What if in spite of her faith, she got COVID because she didn't get vaccinated.  She could pass it on to others including those she loved.  I could not bring myself to say out loud the implications-- would it mean Jesus failed?  Or would it mean that she had failed to get Jesus's protection?  Was there not some religious obligation to not put Jesus in that position?  But of course the ability to ask the question is a demonstration of one's lack of understanding of faith.  Still, it was clear from her response that she was in agony over the possibility.

In the end,  as it turned out, I had not pushed her over the line on vaccination.  But it was also certainly true that I would not be the last person to proffer an opinion on her choice, and her heart was far from at ease on the question.

Her posture is very familiar to me.  You make a decision-- to keep smoking; to quit school or a job; to get back with someone no one thinks is good for you; to associate with bad elements-- for possibly less than stellar reasons -- fear; stubbornness; weak but compelling issues of character or principle or desire for belief; simple willfulness; to be blunt, bad faith and rationalizations-- and the tenuousness of it guarantees that it remains unsettled and that you'll have to explain yourself perpetually to every schmo who wants a crack at knocking sense into you.  The truth is, the decision is made.  It may be an objectively bad decision, but there will be no going back on it, because it has been decided.  If it is wrong and you pay for it and live, it will be a lesson.  But what if, by luck or by some miracle it turns out as you hope and pray it will, to be right? 

What could I do but wish her the best?

Object Impermanence

Recently,  I was asked by my wife to empty drawers in a chest that I hadn't used in years to make room for some of her things.  Once an integral part of my life, the drawers of clothing and odds and ends -- socks, underwear, barely used tee shirts, shorts and jeans, handkerchiefs, a non-functional pocket watch, heirloom cufflinks in case they ever came in handy, small miscellaneous trinkets,  old wallets, expired checks and credit cards and most exotically of all an old jewelry box containing 3 vintage bullets of assorted calibers, almost certainly my father's originally, which I suppose had somehow been shunted to me in the division of his effects following his death -- had fallen out of use due to a long series of micro-evolutions in my daily routine that had migrated the storage and retrieval of most of my day to day wardrobe and accoutrements to the vicinity of the laundry room; it had gotten to the point that the old drawers had sat idle for much more than a decade,  pushing two.  In fact, until my wife asked me if  I could see my way clear to bequeath them to her I'd forgotten about them.  The request felt burdensome at first, and I put it off, but when procrastination was no longer an option, I experienced it as something of an excavation, even a journey back in time to visit a younger, thinner, more vital version of myself.   Scanning the memory hole for what had happened to that person, I drew a blank.  There was no trauma, no revolution, no ceremony or innovation, no abolition or  transmogrification.  To all evidence, that person seems to have systematically undetectably been assumed by this one.  Alas.  I couldn't have known then that my future was not going to be one that would ever involve a need for cufflinks. 

The errand came at the end of a long weekend visit to the camp of some friends from the dawn of our adult lives, whom we hadn't seen in a few years.  I had a nice time, but I had to admit had it not been for my wife who arranged the trip, I probably could have gone the rest of my days without seeing them.  It has nothing to do with them for they are lovely people, but I recognize in myself a sort of growing indifference to people and places that are not immediately in front of my face.  My  workplace, for instance-- I haven't set foot in the building for almost exactly 17 months and I can't visualize what it looks like and have not the curiosity to care to refresh my memory.  The same goes for travel to places I've once loved or never been but once wanted desperately to see-- I was reminded in one of those drawers I cleaned out of an extinguished wanderlust by a small collection of tourist maps that I'm sure were acquired aspirationally in that former life that it turns out simply had to be relocated with everything else to make room for things my wife actually uses today.  I'm not sure if you gave me two plane tickets and all-expenses-paid accommodations to any of those places for travel tomorrow I'd know what to do with them. 

Is something wrong with me?  As long as I have people and instruments at hand that put the distractions and abstractions that keep me enthralled and occasionally involved in the project of living, I don't really care, but it might be good to know.

That younger self... When I was younger, it seemed to me that the United States was fundamentally, constitutionally, at core a nobly constructed entity.  School taught me that it was structured as a continuing project, progressing as it should "in order to form a more perfect union."  The structure involved the checks and balances of a set of 3 competing and complementary branches-- an executive that presided over things, setting the tone and enforcing laws, a legislative that set the laws and approved or disapproved of the executive's actions, subject and answerable as the executive was to public approbation in the form of regular elections by those they represented; and a judicial branch whose members, selected for their wisdom and acumen could wield their power as they saw fit thanks to the shield of permanent appointment to their office.  My younger self through over-exposure to the vagaries, excesses and severe disappointments of neoliberal politics in the 80s and 90s was turned apolitical for his sanity's sake*, but this was only possible because of an enduring belief-- if I'm honest, a faith-- that thanks to the ingeniousness of its design, left to its own devices the more perfect union would ultimately prevail.   Boy was he naive.  What was he doing instead?  Contributing to it.

As for the items from the drawer, they got dispersed.  What wasn't sensible or ethically suitable to pass on went on the trash pile or got punted to other repositories in other corners of the house to be re-encountered in future reorganizations-- I hope I'll figure out by then how to dispose of bullets without harm-- but most were boxed up and deposited at a nearby thrift store donation center.  They're someone else's burden now.

~~~~~

* The return of insanity on my re-engagement in politics demonstrates the wisdom of that strategy.

Let us atheist pray

Dear void which are not in heaven: I heard recently that the situation with respect to global warming is even worse than feared, as our daily experience with the news and weather-- and even sports and traffic-- confirm.  I am led to understand it's not just bad, it is very likely given the current trajectory of both our political climate and our actual one that it is very quickly going to get much worse.  We're having a hard enough time with the actual covid threat in front of our face-- how can anyone expect us to deal, o void, with this existential one that we have long known was coming but have done nothing about?  It seems as though a predicament of such immensity would call for some cooperation amongst us in recognition of our shared circumstances and stakes in the outcome, and yet even the fragments we have broken down into are further fragmenting by the day.  What to do, o void which are not?

I atheist pray that we collectively come to our senses, get on the stick, get on the ball, hop to it before say, fall.  For starters, could we not get a bit more camaraderie on the left?  Could we have much less virtue policing and purity tests and cancellation and infighting and Robespierre moves and a bit more recognition of the benefit of alliance, growth and momentum where it's always needed, on the left where trouble of the most urgent kind always originates?

As long as I'm shouting into the darkness, I might as well pray for wisdom for our elected leaders.  And not political wisdom, but actual experiential wisdom that could be put to service in coordinating a response to our present predicament in such a way as not to favor one group over another but which will bring about an era of sustainable copaceticism far into the future.  May whatever foundation of common interest be strengthened within them and may it be joined by a far-reaching imagination about what is possible that is also actually good-- universal healthcare and an alternative to soulless, corrosive, dead-end capitalism, for instance.

And please may the laws of physics change in some benign way that will nullify privatized, commercialized space technology.

Judgment Day and karma don't make logical sense to me, void.  If their purpose is to incentivize justness in this realm, would it not advantage them to be meted in this realm?   Justice delayed is justice denied.  As much as the science which gives credence to thee, the lameness of two such famous schemes as these also does service to the wisdom of belief on you instead, o void.  Therefore, I atheist pray that the class of people responsible for the impending doom soon begin to feel consequences for their actions and inactions and for the rigid stratifications that they maintain through economic stinginess, weakening them apparently enough that their class can be approached and dismantled, creating the opening for an epoch of transnational communal effort toward a restoration of the planet for all of its creatures.

Finally I ask for health and well-being for my loved ones and if you can spare another favor for myself, an end to my writer's block.  And also a pet koala.

Hear me now, o void (if indeed thou couldst be imagined to have ears with which to hear me).  Thou art great, and I am nothing.  But I implore you: Please do everything in your non-existent power to get it together. Wouldst thou please, void?  (Hello?)

Ready for Anything

To give an indication of how I’m doing, this imagined conversation occurred to me on my way here (Assume Person B is a truthful person):

Person A: Are you ready for anything?

Person B: No.

Person A: Are you ready for anything?

Person B: Yes.

In the first instance of the question, ready-for-anything is an adjective.  Answering in the affirmative requires Person B to feel prepared for any eventuality-- Anything stands in for every conceivable possibility.  Person B knows there are very certainly situations that she is not prepared for, and being a truthful sort, answers in the negative.  In the second instance, ready is alone an adjective and “for anything” adverbially modifies it.  In this case, any stands in only for the at least one case for which person B feels prepared.  She is at least prepared to answer this question, so she answers in the affirmative.  The above dialogue with stage directions:

Person A (cheerfully and optimistically): Are you ready for anything?

Person B: No.

Person A:  (quizzically) Are you ready for anything?

Person B: Yes.

So, to your question about how I’m doing, in the extremely unlikely event that my boss asks me in my meeting this morning if I’m ready for anything, I am now prepared to say Yes.