July 2009 Archives

OR: WHY ALL HISTORY IS POLITICAL Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of their Jewish victims and burn them on giant grates. Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. This we have not done. Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come... Timothy Snyder in the NYRB

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• Russia accuses Poland of starting Second World War (telegraph.co.uk)
• Russia: No More 'False History' (abcnews.go.com)

So after I arm wrestled with the sound collecting for the radio story and got to my seat, the band had found a respectful groove, and they were truly nerdy like you'd expect. Totally engrossed in their instruments, very little eye contact, and tossing off classic licks with original flourishes that would have made lesser musicians weap. Fagen sat up front behind a Fender Rhodes and shades, tilting his head almost like Ray Charles, and developed a rasp, but he was totally committed. He's gone way beyond irony and ennui, now you almost get the feeling this stuff gives him a kick. But like the others, he's way too cool to let on. Becker stood center-left in front of a music stand that obscured a lot of his work, but he took plenty of solos, even though that kid Jon Herington is stone dazzling. The drummer, Keith Carlock, is a serious talent, he didn't let Gadd intimidate him one bit, had the whole Aja thing rolling and spinning on his fingertips, quoting the record, then spinning off again, then coming back to reference your favorite little fills. He can't be 30. IT was one of those concerts that makes you feel old -- in a good way. Backup singers off to the right were always worth watching, smiling, swaying, concocting little dance moves, the only ones at their own private party over there. Fagen didn't talk until after Aja came to a finish, and then he announced they would play ROYAL SCAM. BOOM! "Kid Charlemagne," with 3500 people standing up singing every word. Ensemble got tighter and more involved as it rolled on. And that was something to hear, since they were spot-on to start -- now they started sweating. And the encores started with "Hey Nineteen" and went on from there, another 40 minutes at least of odds and ends. No material past 1980. Closed with "Boston Rag" and "Dirty Water," as if the hippest beatniks in the world could also pretend to be Red Sox fans.

Listen up to today's story on NPR's HERE AND NOW at 12:45pm EDT, podcast coming shortly.

Rent Party 09 lineup

It's impossible to say anything original about Michael Jackson, so I won't even try. As a celebrity and a media presence, for so much of his life, he cannot be extricated from all the words and images and sounds that he generated, or that were (and still are being) generated about him. Just as we cannot separate his music and performance from his persona, from all the allegations and scandals and media frenzies of his later years, so we cannot separate the "real" Michael Jackson from everything that has been thought and written and spoken and speculated about him. So, I can't write about him without quoting what other people have already written about him, both now just after his death, and over the years before...Pinocchio Theory responding to "The Freak of Consensual Sentimentality," by Greil Marcus in k-punk

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• Michael Jackson to have Moon Crater named after him (inquisitr.com)

THE TWO EASIEST media responses to the death of a public figure are reverence or ridicule, and Michael Jackson made both easy. A singer of breathtaking suppleness and soulfulness, one whose early work with the Jackson 5 the rock critic Dave Marsh called "the last great moment of soul as we knew it," and a dancer who, as the film critic David Edelstein observed in a piece on CBS's "Sunday Morning," seemed intent on synthesizing the entire history of popular dance from Fred Astaire on, Jackson was one of the few performers who could truly amaze you. And as a reclusive, obviously troubled man whose talents were eclipsed by public eccentricities and allegations of private behavior that despite a not-guilty verdict in his 2002 child molestation trial most of us still believe, Jackson was, like Elvis, an active participant in creating an image of himself as freak... Charles Taylor in Dissent

Rock'n'roll was once a working-class occupation. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Billy Fury and Johnny Hallyday saw music as a way out and up, like sport, hell-fire preaching or trade union politics. That Fury and Hallyday didn't grow up picking cotton or shining shoes mattered very little. They weren't students of the music, but clung to it as unselfconsciously and with the same desperate energy as their mass audiences... producer Joe Boyd in the Guardian

From Noise Addicts, an impressive list, especially since many of these do not involve chemicals or gunplay. In fact, the subtext is really: business as usual. To participate, submit your favorite 1) missing celebs 2) producers 3) dead celebs, or 4) other non-musician industry beggars. "And please, no wagering."

Glaring Omission: Ike Turner
For Further Research: Frankie Laine
Symbolic Overlord: Vanilla Ice