D CDs #499: Confronted With The New Paradigm

WELCOME TO B.B. KING LIVE IN COOK COUNTY JAIL: A CHOOSE YOUR OWN REVIEW POST.

1

It has been a miserable summer, this summer.  More sweat than sun, and more rain than either.  Even that wouldn't be so bad with a breath of wind from time to time.  Rain without wind is boring; just gravity.  Nobody cool cares about gravity anymore.

Safe inside, or trapped inside, or both, you sigh in the way only the British and dogs can sigh, and you decide on a CD, hoping to eat up some time before you can leave the house, or go to bed, whichever comes first. Feeling capricious, or possibly just starved for distraction, you grab an album at random and load it into the tray.

What bursts from stereo takes you by surprise for a moment.  This isn't music.  It's a woman announcing an upcoming act whilst a piano is played lazily in the background.

Your current review score is 0.  If you have any interest in American history or musicology, turn to 6.  If you just want some goddamn tunes, turn to 3.

2

Oh, dear.  It's not as though you're completely against the idea of some neat noodling, or anything, but six minutes of it in two songs is really too much.  It's not even so much that you don't like instrumental stretches, but there's only so long times you can hear a guy pulling off a riff over frankly fairly rudimentary bass and piano backing before you start to wonder when something interesting will happen.  For the record, six minutes in two songs is too long a time.  

Not that it isn't competently done.  But it's something to appreciate, not feel.  And if blues music isn't making you feel something, it's hard to not conclude that something is missing.  Maybe this is one of those times something really is lost from not being there in person.

In any case, subtract half a tentacle from your review score and turn to 8.

3

It occurs to you that a CD boasting only eight tracks and a 38 minute run-time has an exceptional cheek kicking off with a spoken word track in which the act you already know will appear, having bought his record, is introduced.  You don't need to be informed of when the show is about to start.  You have the fucking CD.  Turn to 4.

4

The introductions over, the first song begins.  "Everyday I Have the Blues" is simply brilliant, a fast-paced run through an old blues staple that manages that uncanny feat that exemplifies what might be the genre's single greatest trick: making misery defiantly uplifting and, more, something to dance to.  As the song finishes you feel exhilarated, eagerly anticipating what comes next.  Add six tentacles to your review score.

If you have a love of tasty blues riffs spread over a ludicrously wide space of time, turn to 10.  Otherwise, turn to 2.

5

You don't even understand why you own this album.  Or are reading a blog without a Confederate Flag at the top.  B B King's voice begins to burn into your brain, and you begin to panic that you have become contaminated in some way.  The knowledge of how far civil rights has come since that afternoon in 1971 suddenly becomes clear to you.  You've already lost!  The world has spun on without you!

You begin to hear drums pounding inside your head.  The drums of history.  The ticking clock that's counting down your kind's final days on this Earth.  They will remember what you fought for, but none will understand.

YOUR ADVENTURE ENDS HERE

No, wait.

First you get syphilis.

Now YOUR ADVENTURE ENDS HERE

6

It occurs to you that live albums are, almost always, a product of their times.  So are studio albums, of course, but they can often hide it better.  They are works of fiction.  A live album is a recitation of fiction, to an audience who are quite real.

On this occasion, the audience is a group of convicts, seemingly predominantly black from the faded picture which accompanies the liner notes.  Convicts, as you learn from the liner notes, from a jail previously notorious for letting the inmates very much run the place, and who were unsurprisingly far from happy when a new governor, Winston Moore, took over and had the temerity to start running it as though it were actually a prison.

Listening to this introduction, then, in which the MC unflappably thanks Moore for organising the gig and for Chief Justice of the Criminal Court Joseph Power for attending, and hearing the raucous sound of booing from those not particularly fond of those who put people in cells, nor of those who keep them there, there's  a brief moment, however far removed, of feeling some jolt of connection to a day 41 years distant.  

This album was a historical document all along, but nowhere is that made clearer than in these opening ninety seconds.  Some discs you can carry through the rest of our lives.  This one stays where it always was, and you can only visit.  Add half a tentacle to your review score, and turn to 4.

7

Alright. It's a weird thing to have heard in the middle of a blues number, but whatever.  Turn to 11.

8

This is very much an album of two halves, you notice, glancing at the liner notes.  This first half features nothing actually written by King.  He's playing other people's songs, and doing a pretty good job of it (add two to your current review score).  Halfway through "Worry, Worry", though, he puts the blues singing away to interact with his audience, as though the exact middle ground between a revivalist preacher and a carnival barker.  It's time to dole out some relationship advice, which is arguably a stable door/bolted horse deal for some of the assembled, but never mind.  The guy has charisma and delivery, there's no way around it.

Then we get onto the subject of beating your woman. "Don't go upside her head!" King exclaims, and I don't think anyone's going to argue with him there. "Judge sez it's cheaper if you don't beat her!" he continues.

If you think jokes about wife beating are never acceptable, and particularly not when talking to a crowd who you suspect must include some domestic abusers, turn to 9.

If you're not sure about whether white people in 2012 get to judge the humour of a black man in 1971, and aren't worried to much about whether this is the soft bigotry of low expectations, or if you think a jokes just a joke, maybe, or something, turn to 7.

If you straight out just don't like black people, turn to 5.

9

You can't let this one go.  Banter is one thing, but this bothers you too much to dismiss.  Subtract one tentacle from your review score, and turn to 11.

10

You're in luck! Tasty blues riffs spread over a ludicrously wide space of time!  Hell, the second song doesn't even really start until the three minute mark!  The song after that spends almost as much time to spool up.  And throughout these meandering introductions, King handles his guitar like the pro he is, offering skill without flash, and familiarity without repetition.  Add one tentacle to your review score, and turn to 8.

11

The second half of the CD now begins; mainly featuring songs written by King himself.  Frankly, it doesn't work quite so well.  There's that weird blues habit of repeating the first line of a verse, which is fine, except this is already an exceptionally simplistic record lyrically, and these later tunes aren't enough to make up for them, despite some good bass work and excellent support from the trumpet and saxophones.  It's far too easy to not even realise one song has ended and another's begun, which is never a good sign.

That said, it ends pretty well with "Please Accept My Love", but it's still hard not to see this as a pretty front-loaded album. Subtract one tentacle from your review score and turn to 12.

12.

With a soft click, the CD player announces it has completed the task you set it.  As you glance out of the window (the same unending rain glints at you through the streetlight), you ponder what you've just heard.  Was it really the 499th best album of all time, as Rolling Stone once claimed?  A diverting enough LP with some interesting historical context?  Or a phenomenal showman who for whatever reason lacked the songs to back him up on this occasion?

That depends on your path through this Choose Your Own Review post.  Your current review score is your final adjudication regarding the record's quality.  

THE END

PS: Also, congratulations on not contracting syphilis.

"The Cradle Of The Best And Of The Worst"

Two quick notes on our cousins across the pond, one encouraging, the other... well, you'll see.

First the good news: gay marriage support has been unanimously approved as part of the Democratic Party platform.  It's not totally a done deal, since the precise language still needs to be worked out, and very few people ever lost money on betting Democrats being too venal and cowardly to get anything done ("breaking news: Democrats abandon plans for piss-up in brewery after Limbaugh points out Communists liked vodka"), but it's a welcome development. 

Obama's party are now on record of being in favour of a free choice between adults over who they marry, protection for those who learned they were illegally brought into the country as children, and the idea that non-wealthy Americans should not be allowed to live in crippling pain and abject terror. The Republican convention in Tampa will come out against all three.  Following that convention, Romney's poll numbers will go up.  Go figure.

Anyway, onto the rather less impressive news.  Well, it's not exactly news, really - which in itself is cause for reflection - but Chief Justice Antonin "Get over it" Scalia is on a book tour, and here's what he has to say on interpreting the right to bear arms in the 21st Century

SCALIA: We’ll see. Obviously the Amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried — it’s to keep and “bear,” so it doesn’t apply to cannons — but I suppose here are hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes, that will have to be decided.


WALLACE: How do you decide that if you’re a textualist?

SCALIA: Very carefully.

For those who aren't up on the lingo, a "textualist" is basically someone convinced that there can be no extrapolation of the Constitution to represent the progress of the US as a country over 200+ years, because a text written by multiple authors frequently at odds with each other contains a single "intent" that just so happens to be whatever modern-day conservatives believe in at any given time (seriously; Scalia literally reversed his position on what the document says just before his Affordable Care Act ruling; the ruling he came out with would have been impossible under what he insisted was the "intention of the framers" for the entirety of his previous career).

So, for those keeping score: an immensely complicated multi-part law modelled on previously-judged constitutional processes aimed at improving the health of the American people?  Obviously needs to be thrown out in its entirety, because it might lead to the government force-feeding people broccoli, and because judging each part separately would take, like, a really long time (I am not exaggerating in the slightest here).  Whether or not individual citizens have the constitutional right to own shoulder-mounted rocket launchers?  That shit is complex!

(I confess I had the same question that ABL has in the link above: what about suitcase nukes?  I've seen Starship Troopers.  But the truth is, I don't think the possibility of shoving an a-bomb into an RPG and letting rip really has Scalia worried at all, since it would only ever be rich white guys who could afford them.  Scalia's biggest fear on this score is that portable nuke launchers would make killing ducks too easy during his next hunting trip with Dick Cheney.)

In case it hasn't been obvious from this and other posts, I despise Antonin Scalia.  Really and truly, my blood boils whenever I think of him.  Not because he's wrong, or even because his wrongness comes with a body count.  It's because he's simultaneously an unprincipled hack, a terrible debater, and a constant scold of others for lacking integrity and intelligence.  A man of unsurpassed arrogance who will spend the morning violating the constitutional principles that are his job to uphold, the afternoon calling his colleagues unworthy of their positions, and his evenings cruising the talk show circuit hawking a book about how only he is principled enough to be able to change his principles when they no longer suit him.

Because he's a guy who can argue it would be a terrible idea to let cameras film the Supreme Court because the media would distort the truth of what goes on - only an idiot would disagree! - and can also argue there's no reason to worry about the staggering amounts of corporate money pouring into political campaigns right now, because the American people are smart enough to tell when political ads are distorting the truth of what goes on.  Only a monarchy-lover would disagree!

And because he can argue both those things during the same interview.

The Bonfire Of The Vanities

When last we delved into the story of Lucifer, we considered the nature of absence. Absence, as I argued, is simply the presence of some other concept, or some other state of mind. This is why Lucifer's insistence that there is nothing he wishes to acquire is entirely reasonable on its face, but distinctly lacking when you dig into it.

Death has already worked this out, of course, but further ruminations on this subject will have to wait. Lucifer has an appointment to keep in Hell, and whatever else one might want to say about him (quietly, for fear he may hear you), the Morningstar is a not someone to keep his enemies waiting.

Instances Of Darkness I Have Known

Brutal Snake was kind enough to buy this for me a couple of birthdays ago, and I've finally found time in among my comic reading/cider drinking/shouting at clouds schedule to give it a whirl.

It's not hard to see why Brutal (Mr Snake?  Or is it Dr Snake these days?) thought this would appeal to me; one of the main characters is essentially a probability monk who uses his total understanding of stochastic concepts to control men, destroy opponents, and eventually get laid.  Just like in real life!

Moving beyond that point, which I can understand may be of more interest to me than to anyone else, more than anything else, this book struck me as Dune by way of A Song of Ice and Fire.  The similarities to both are fairly obvious. Bakker seems to have at least some interest in recreating the feel of Herbert's masterpiece; the political intrigue flowing from a multitude of political factions - many of which are nominally under the control of others, and others which are nominally antagonistic but have formed common cause - reminded me a great deal of the diplomatic feints and lunges of much of Dune, which in both cases can best be described as two people dancing around each other until one gets the chance to utterly destroy the other.  Even some of the names of various nations and families evoke the galaxy under the rule of the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV.   And if the lethal warriors of the Scylvendi aren't essentially the Fremen with access to fermented mare's milk, that's only because they've been mixed with some aspects of Stephen Donaldson's Haruchai as well.

The similarities to Martin's ongoing series are both more specific and less important.  Indeed, whilst this is a story about an ancient evil once more stirring in the north, with their only opponents a pitiful laughing stock within a culture that has forgotten its peril, one could (and I do) argue that this represents Martin and Bakker simply blowing the dust off a similar old trope, before doing their own thing with it.  There's no similarity between the No-God and his Consult allies and the Others of Martin's Land Beyond the Wall, and Bakker is happy to use his choice of names and imagery to remind us that really this was all Tolkien's idea in any case.

Speaking of Martin, however, and considering the flak he has gotten from many sources over potential misogyny (some of which is overblown or badly argued, some of which is entirely correct, particularly in his latest book), it's worth noting that this book suffers badly from a lack of strong female characters.  Indeed, there are only three women who have more than a couple of lines.  One is an uncommonly beautiful girl who is constantly being abducted and raped; mere property to those who possess or wish to possess her (still, at least she has a "perfect breast").  A second is an embittered harridan who was once the most gorgeous woman in an empire, and is increasingly pissed off that no-one wants to fuck her anymore (except possibly her son; there's some incestuous interplay going on here, another reminder of Martin's work).The third is a prostitute who alternates between wishing a man would save her from her drudgery and needing a man to save her from angry religious types.

That perhaps sounds worse than it is.  It's not as though men come across particularly well in the book, nor the religious, nor scholars, nor warriors, nor spies.  Still, in what remains a recurring problem for fantasy fiction, The Darkness... isn't really helping.

Whether or not one can overcome this problem is a matter for yourselves.  I you can, though, there's a lot to like here.  I've mentioned the debt Bakker owes to Herbert, but this is far from a pale retread; the world of Earwa and the lands of the Three Seas are their own world, and Bakker does well both in building his fictional places and in introducing them to us without relying on clumsy exposition (naming his chapters after locations in the story doesn't entirely work, though).  The characterisation is good, and the plot interesting and well-paced, packed full of the aforementioned political manoeuvring interspersed with occasional bouts of arcane horror and vicious bloodshed.  I finished this first volume of three (1:3) with a strong desire to buy the next book in the series, which is always a good sign.

Be warned, though, the ending is unforgivably anti-climactic. Indeed, the final chapter is absolutely baffling in how much it slams the breaks on a building narrative and seemingly just twiddles its thumbs.  Maybe I'm missing something, though.

Still, all told, this is a four and a half star book with one and a half star female characters.  Draw your own conclusions.

Every Dog Has His Election Day

What intelligent mind could not fail to be delighted at the news that leftist dogs, tired perhaps of the endless foolishness of their Virginia masters, have finally chosen to take matters into their own paws?  The surrounding humans may think they have stymied this glorious push towards the socialist utopia by barring the list of dogs given on the website, but they have been PLAYED FOR FOOLS!

The real leftist dogs, the true rousers of the canine rabble, are shown below.  Soon, America, there will be none amongst you who know not their names, save those whose deaths are too quick for grim realisation to dawn.  Allow me to introduce you to:

Karl Barx:

 "Private property has made us so stupid and partial
that an object is only ours when we play fetch with it."

Che Gruffvara:

"The life of a single dog is worth a million times more
than all the dog biscuits of the richest man on Earth."

Fido Castro:

"A revolution is a fight to the death
between the future and the cats."

and Leon Terrierotsky:

"The life of a revolutionary would be quite impossible
without a certain amount of walkies."

plus, obviously:

Bo Obama, secret Communist doggy of the secret Communist Muslim.

Mend your ways, America, before it's too late.  Your dogs are watching you.

You have been warned...

Radio Friday: Strange New Worlds

Next up on Rolling Stone's list of 500 greatest albums of all time is Live From Cook County Jail by B B King.  It's another marked departure for me, so let's celebrate my grudging concessions to multiculturalism with a little slice of the man's blues.  Which he has EVERY DAY.

"Us White Dudes Gotta Stick Together"

I'm kind of torn over which part of this is more offensive; suggesting Obama doesn't understand the UK because he lacks an Anglo Saxon heritage, or the idea that we might be dumb enough to swallow it.

Just kidding.  It's the first one.

I suppose I could point out there's plenty of white Americans would be pretty annoyed if you called them Anglo Saxons - like say the Italian-, Norwegian-, Polish- and German-Americans, pluse of course the Irish-Americans, who'd tear Romney's guts out if he chucked that term their way - and pissing them off to court David Cameron is a pretty stupid choice.

I could also point out that, the Daily Telegraph's typically milquetoast statements on anything to do with race notwithstanding - this "may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity" in roughly the same way that consuming a cement mixer may prompt suggestions of a lack of dietary balance - that's a spectacularly offensive statement from a British perspective as well.  My girlfriend isn't Anglo-Saxon.  Plenty of my buddies aren't Anglo-Saxon, or of any European heritage in general.  I grew up in a part of the country where there's a non-trivial chance of being closer to a Viking than anyone from a German tribe, and an hours drive from places where you're more likely to have the Ganges run through your ancestral veins than you do the Rhine.

Instead, though, let's focus on the main point: Mitt Romney wants the UK to believe that we share less in common with a Protestant whose father came from the Commonwealth than we do with a man from a country that fought a war against us when we wouldn't let them slaughter enough Native Americans for their liking, and who belongs to a religion that believes magical underpants are given to them by American Jesus, which is why they get to posthumously baptise Jewish Holocaust victims.

There are weirder things than being black, is my point.