"Around the World," Daft Punk (1997): Yes, a lot of Daft Punk is fairly obviously a techno disco homage. If you already don't like disco or dance music this is an easy copout way to dismiss them. They can't sing. Their instruments are laptop computers. But if you like disco or dance music and Giorgio Moroder and Italo Disco and Romanthony then Daft Punk are '90s chart breakthrough for disco and goofy EDM genius, even if they get more broad and cliche as they go. Isn't that the way it often goes? And am I crazy or am I hearing some more "Good Times"? "Around the World" is the globalization of disco, although Madonna already did that. How about Daft Punk put the disco in electronica? Body music. Turn out the lights, turn on the disco ball. We're up all night to get lucky, even knowing already we won't, because we already are to feel this good. Thank the robots. The sex machines. Spin like a top, you can dance anyway you like. And "Get Lucky" (2013), much later, broader, more cliche, was a great dance song as well. Another bit of disco music keeping on keeping on.
The Seattle Reign Crown Megan Rapinoe
“When you look at [my jersey in the rafters], well I guess you’ll be thinking of me,” she said. “But just know that every time I look at that number, I’m gonna see you. I’m gonna see every pride flag, and every trans flag, and every Black Lives Matter flag, and every equal pay flag, and every ‘Fuck Portland’ flag. And I’m gonna see purple hair and pink hair and a short stint of blue hair. And I’m gonna see families that I feel like I grew up with…. So just know that when you’re looking up and thinking about me, I’m looking up and thinking about all of you, and all of the incredible moments that we shared.”
I've never been and don't know much about soccer (other than that I find the Vuvuzela even more annoying than the baseball/football stadium Wave, which they probably do at soccer too) but salute, and a big Yay, for Megan Rapinoe! And also Sue Bird, right in pic, who played for the Storm, Seattle's most successful sports franchise this century, and who recently got a street named after her.
The royal couple of Seattle sports.
Hannah Murphy Winter at The Stranger
"the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world," Thomas Hardy
Her eyes met his, and remained on him awhile.
"We are rather a sad family, don't you think, Jude?"
"She [their recently deceased aunt] said we made bad husbands and wives. Certainly we make unhappy ones. At all events, I do, for one!
Sue was silent. "Is it wrong, Jude," she said with a tentative tremor, "for a husband or wife to tell a third person that they are unhappy in their marriage? If a marriage ceremony is a religious thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is only a sordid contract, based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing, and the inheritance of land and money by children, making it necessary that the male parent should be known-- which it seems to be-- why surely a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops, that it grieves him or her?"
"I have said so, anyhow, to you."
The character of Sue Bridehead, her strength, her flashing brilliance, what Jude loves above all else, is the revelation here. Tess had her own mind but not like this. Otherwise, forgot how much I liked Hardy's doomed romanticism. His rural Wessex is indelible; my most lasting impression of the British Shire prior to the Lord of the Rings movies (yes I know they were really shot in New Zealand). Rolling hills with big territorial viewpoints, lush, green, a patchwork of woods and open fields and stone enclosures, a church steeple in the distance. Lots of walking, you can smell the wet grass and small peasant homesteads. Class divisions insult and demean in the towns but they are where all the work was. Hardy's characters, men, women, stoic, mysterious, or impulsive, all from the countryside, struggle with the ferocity of their emotions. There are two climactic romantic scenes that are as vivid and thrilling as your first or last kiss with someone you can't forget. Marriage, religion, and social conventions make people miserable in the Victorian 19th century. A longing and suffering for a love, something, unbounded by these conventions and strictures, and which always remains fleeting and beyond the grasp, if it does not lead in fact to self-destruction, suffuses all Hardy's novels, or the ones I've gotten to so far. Jude the Obscure is no exception and might be a peak. It was his last novel and he was hounded for it when it came out. For its disparaging depiction of marriage conventions and pompous religious piety. He vowed to never write another novel and only wrote poetry thereafter.
"Toy Love Song," Toy Love (1980)
The blare to the recording is harsh but grows into something. Toy Love were an early punk rock band from New Zealand. They originated from Dunedin and were active between 1978 and 1980; ofter referred to as progenitors of the Dunedin sound that Flying Nun Records began documenting in the 1980s. More Chris Knox, Alec Bathgate (later Tall Dwarfs), and Paul Kean (later The Bats).
Lina Khan and Antitrust Enforcers: "The Rent Is Too Damn High!"
"In fact, there was no mystery behind the inflation that Americans were experiencing, inflation in everyday items paired with skyrocketing corporate profits. There was a conspiracy, orchestrated by some of the richest men in the country. Median asking rents had spiked by as much as 18% in the spring of 2022, and that was outrageous. Moreover, rents are just out of control more broadly. As the Antitrust Division notes, "the percentage of income spent on rent for Americans without a college degree increased from 30% in 2000 to 42% in 2017."
Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists
"Kamala Harris’s proposed price-gouging ban might irritate academics, but it makes sense to everyone else.
Here, regular people seem to understand a few things that economists don’t. During an emergency, such as a natural disaster, short-term demand cannot be met by short-term supply, setting the stage for sellers to exploit their position by raising prices on goods already in their inventory. The idealized law of supply and demand predicts that new investors would rush in, but the real world doesn’t work like that. A short-term price spike won’t always trigger the long-term investments needed to increase supply, because everyone knows that the situation is, by definition, abnormal; they can’t count on a continued revenue boom. During a rare blizzard, sellers might jack up the prices of snowblowers. But investors aren’t going to set up a new snowblower-manufacturing hub based on a blizzard, because by the time they had any inventory to sell, the snow would long be melted. So after the disruption, all goes back to normal—except with a big wealth transfer from the public to the company that raised prices."
Zephyr Teachout at The Atlantic
Exactly! With the economists it's always what is it about the laws of supply and demand and free markets you people do not understand? The natural supply and demand price mechanism is always economizing and expanding markets and maximizing economic growth but only if "free" and unfettered by government rules and regulations, like price-gouging bans, price controls, rent controls, and the like. It's a pipe dream and religion at this point.
JK Galbraith had a hand in fashioning the successful and popular price controls implemented during WW2. He remarked of the experience afterwards that the first obstacle they had to overcome was trying to apply price controls to perfect competitive market models because it failed time and time again. There appeared to be nearly no such thing as a market with perfect competition in the real economy. But when they fashioned price controls to the specific power dynamics of particularly important markets they had way more success, effectively curbing price gouging and excessive profiteering while not only not impeding but in fact boosting production.
By the way, Teachout wrote a book called Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United (2014). From taking a snuff box as a gift from a foreign country costing you your office to judges taking millions in gifts and everyone knows it and they are untouchable, above the law. Stunning historical trajectory. Great anti-corruption history.
A Chicago Welcome to the DNC:
James Fallows, Jimmy Carter's speechwriter, and longtime top-notch journalist, from his Breaking The News:
Jazz Dance: The Story Of American Vernacular Dance
By Marshall & Jean Stearns (1966)
"Describing an incident at the Savoy [dance ballroom in Harlem NYC] in 1937, Leon James [Lindy Hop dancer] remarks: 'Dizzy Gillespie was featured in the brass section of Teddy Hill's screaming band. A lot of people had him pegged as a clown, but we loved him. Every time he played a crazy lick, we cut a crazy step to go with it. And he dug us and blew even crazier stuff to see if we could dance to it, a kind of game, with the musicians and dancers challenging each other.
One of the reasons for the early development of great big-band jazz at the Savoy was the presence of great dancers" Jazz Dance, page 325
Largely written by suit & tie Ivy Leaguer Marshall Stearns, but when the writer died suddenly before finishing Jazz Dance, Jean Stearns, also a recognized jazz buff, and Marshall's wife, finishes and publishes his historical opus. I can't even recall for sure where I got the reference but the title definitely came up in one of my turtle-slow reading projects investigating, in this case, the roots of 20th c music in 19th c music. Going in I expected a snobby ballroom dancing take. And wasn't entirely disappointed when Stearns dismisses all rock & roll dancing as sloppy ripoffs of the great dance crazes of the Jazz Age (1920s) and Swing Eras (1930s and 1940s). But by the end of the book I've fully forgiven him. Jazz Dance is a rich history, largely first person (from copious interviews); a history of Black song and dance entertainers and their contributions to Jazz music, going all the way back to the minstrel music performers of the 1830s and 1840s. Actually, Black stars rarely appear on Broadway or in Hollywood up to the 1950s but by the 1920s, despite the racism and segregation, Black music is stylistically dominant in popular music. If it's not Black people playing and performing the music then it's white people trying to play like them. Hot Jazz and the Swing Era were a pinnacle for tap dancing, and another American invention. Few dancers could keep up with the frantic changes in Bebop in the 1950s, though. And tellingly one of the few that could, Cholly Atkins, of Atkins & Coles tap fame in the 1940s and '50s, went on to become the house choreographer for Motown and coached the dancing of such rock & roll stars as the Cadillacs, Shirelles, Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, Little Anthony & the Imperials, all the way up to the O'Jays and the Sylvers in the disco 1970s. Curiously, there is a chapter devoted to Fred Astaire, who is given his due as a first rate "hoofer" with his own style. But barely a mention in the book of Gene Kelly, maybe because by the 1950s jazz music isn't scoring the big musicals the way it was in Astaire's 1930s? The ending feels abrupt, not surprisingly, given Marshall's premature death. And all the dance crazes while curious wash over me, leaving few to memory. But the power of Black music and dance in the social history of America, overcoming racism to dominate the Jazz Age and Swing Era is a heck of a story and told here with unassuming legibility and dedicated enthusiasm.
Norma Miller tells the story of how she came to dance at the Savoy when she was 12 years old.
Bill "Bojangles" Robinson does his "sand dance" on a river boat loaded with cotton bales, transcending his shuffling minstrel image of the happy slave with his own irrepressibly joyful dancing and, coincidentally, the invention of the pogo or pogoing dance style. A 1940s version of Ska-Punkers Fishbone provide backup. From Cabin in the Sky (1943):
Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin" in peak form but sadly he dies shortly after the release of Stormy Weather (1943). This version of his hoary classic is a long sly blues windup, Fats mugging for the camera, and then an all out boogie-woogie and '20s hot jazz blowout. A living legend at likely his most florid on film: "The joint is jumpin'."
Fred Astaire says the Nicholas Brothers "Jumpin' Jive" dance with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather is "the greatest movie musical number he'd ever seen."
The Lindy Hop scene in Hellzapoppin' (1941): A mini jazz history lesson culminating and amalgamating in a dance craze at or near at the pinnacle of the Swing Era.
* To be honest, I can't whole heartedly recommend any of these movies. Stormy Weather comes closest, for its sheer volume of strong musical performances. But these are big moments in the story Stearns tells.
"Up," Tall Dwarfs (1996)
I was thinking listening to the album this song comes from, Stumpy, that maybe by 1996 the Dwarfs have lost a step but actually the music, rather than their own as on previous releases, is their curation and editing of music made by sixteen home tapers from all around the world. Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate wrote the songs but then put the music together from these home cassette recordings they collected from other lo-fi home tapers like themselves. That's why they call themselves on this album the International Tall Dwarfs. And maybe why this one has the ghostly cast of the Velvet's "Heroin," slowed down and stretched out for all its spiritual-emotional worth. This is also Galaxy 500 territory, although not sure they have any song quite 19-minutes long. Epic lo-fi. Bloodletting indie rock; an uplifting dirge. Hummable. Rock-a-bye Baby, Up.
Trump's Second or Third Coup Plot
Bidenomics for the Green New Deal
"Biden’s economic program looks less like a deliberate attempt to move beyond neoliberalism and more like an ongoing commitment to political pragmatism over any particular economic ideology. That it worked is a testament not to Biden’s profound economic foresight, but to the limits of economic analysis. Economists often disagree with one another over important issues, which means that on any given question, a lot of them are just wrong. The Federal Reserve, for instance, spent the past two years trying to generate mass layoffs in order to cure inflation. Those layoffs never materialized—economists aren’t really sure why—and inflation came down anyway, because the Fed had misdiagnosed its cause. The country had been suffering not from an excess of household wealth, but from a pandemic-induced supply crunch."
Full-employment is Biden's True Legacy, by Zachary D. Carter, Slate
Go Joe! And Harris/Walz will be his legacy! Of note, however, the Fed's misdiagnosis is in fact pure neoliberalism. The market, or supply shocks, in this instance, which were obvious at the time to everyone paying attention, and historically expected after any global disruption in normal economic operations, were ignored by the Fed. Like the role of "seller's inflation," in the subsequent surge of inflation, is ignored to this day by the Fed and elite journalists and economic experts. According to these people, unfettered market and corporate behavior cannot be the problem; and should never be regulated or reformed, this is the neoliberal default position. And it's the position of the Fed and mainstream economics and so the mainstream media, coincidentally all owned and paid for by corporate oligarchs. Biden's genius, attributable probably to spending decades in the special interest scrum that is congress, is in calling out and going after the failings of the neoliberal order-- yeah, pragmatically-- while not getting tied up in soapboxing ideological battles with the chattering class, where he'd have to explain to the public via corporate owned media that so-called "free markets" are in fact not very free at all-- as he's already noted after all, "trickle-down economics don't work"-- but are actually costly for workers, the environment, and when you get down to it not even the most pro-growth or not the kind of economic growth that promotes sustainability and the shared general prosperity of all Americans, anyway.
"Clam Shells and Roller Skates"-- The Triumph of Chic's Good Times
I really don't follow what's happening with the rock & roll hall of fame much. I visited the place once in Cleveland. Lots of fun rock & roll trivia. I wore a baseball cap with a yellow 7" record insert symbol I picked up in the Hall merch store until it was threadbare and falling apart. The annual ballot for new inductees into the Hall usually turns up in one of my news feeds and at least half the lists, it's been my impression, look like no-brainers to me.
There's a lot of great rock & roll, why be stingy about it? The Hall ought to celebrate the immense diversity of rock & roll. Not narrowcast it as another classic rock only format. I've heard Chic have been nominated and failed eleven times to get inducted into the rock & roll hall of fame. That's ridiculous, and should be a shaming embarrassment to the music writers who vote. Chic should be in the rock & roll hall of fame for one song alone, "Good Times," and its' tremendous pop influence.
If one song isn't enough, which sounds weirdly anti-rock & roll to me, Chic have at least two other classic disco hits and turned into solid album artists. But, again, for "Good Times" alone, Chic belong in the Hall, easy. See/hear below.
Anyway, they call the place the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but seem unfortunately hung-up on Rock and the rock stars era. To my mind rock & roll takes off in 1954 or 1955. It's Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, The Coasters, The Shirelles, Ronnettes, Everly Brothers, Sun Records, Atlantic Records (including LaVern Baker, Bobbettes, Ruth Brown), Etta James, The Fleetwoods, the rest of the 1950s and, really, expands exponentially from there til possibly the end of the Century and the collapse of the record industry or why not all the way to the present? Rock & roll is more a mixed race/multicultural, by now vastly complex, constellation of sounds than any classic guitar rock cliche, not that there's anything wrong with the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. My point is Hiphop is as much Rock & Roll as Classic Rock as is Folk Rock as is EDM as is Punk Rock as is Disco, etc.
And maybe it's all only rock & roll but I like it.
"Good Times," Chic: Number one on Hot 100 in 1979.
"Rapper's Delight,' Sugarhill Gang: Reached 36 on Hot 100 same year.
"Rapture," Blondie: Number one in 1981.
The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steal: Also from 1981 a live DJ mix of Flash cutting, scratching, and mixing a bunch of records, including "Good Times," "Rapture," Sugarhill Gang, Queen, Spoonie Gee, and Mr. Rogers. It's an ultramagnetic party mix based musically on Niles Rodgers' funky guitar and Bernard Edwards' super fat bass. And, Flash, winningly, DJ'ing for a bunch of kids whooping it up getting down to his fresh beats and cartoon wit. It's disco and New Wave and Flash's cutting stabs of proto-hiphop turntable hooks.
Oh yeah, and another one: Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Spent 15 weeks on the Billboard Top 10 in 1980. In all, "Good Times" is a dominant force on the charts for three years running, helps launch Hiphop, and has been sampled by over 200 pop songs since coming out in 1979.
Americans want to rein in Supreme Court justices, poll finds
Last month, the court’s conservative majority granted Republican nominee Donald Trump and future presidents broad immunity from prosecution for acts committed in office, potentially sinking Trump’s historic New York hush money conviction and pending cases stemming from his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
In the wake of the immunity decision, some 70% of Americans favor a constitutional amendment stating that no person – including the president – is above the law, according to the poll, with 54% of Republicans joining 72% of independents and 89% of Democrats.
More good numbers at: USA Today
Twenty-six former Officials Say Trump Unfit to be POTUS
"They’ve expressed their concerns about his character, his leadership, his impulsiveness, and his narcissism, among other traits. The opposition from so many former close aides is unprecedented in the annals of American politics."
“Weird” Is a Rebuke to Republican Dominance Politics
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Are you weird? According to Democrats—who have made “weird” a new term of art for Republicans—you’re weird if you get overexercised about the genitalia of Olympic athletes, think childless people shouldn’t have the right to vote, and generally fixate on controlling women, families, gender, and sexuality for reasons that seem transparently bound up in your own embattled masculinity and deep shame. You’re weird if you yell in public about sharks, or about “Joe Biden’s border bloodbath,” especially while your hands dance to music only you can hear. You’re weird if you want to track strangers’ menstrual cycles but are mad that people know you Googled “dolphin porn.” You’re weird if you campaign vigorously on issues that fly against common sense, such as getting rid of library books, abolishing the Department of Education, and giving the President dictatorial powers. “Weird” is multipurpose, a catchall designation for extreme or intense things that Republicans do or say. Its capaciousness is part of its appeal."
Go Katy Waldman! (another reason to subscribe to the NY-er)
I can't find this meme/photo that made the rounds in the middle of the pandemic. It's two people sitting next to each other on a public bus. A little old lady in a big overcoat and a nonbinary kid with fuchsia hair. The caption reads: Urban nightmare! I might be adding the exclamation point but I loved that photo. Nothing is more bullshit and nothing riles me up more than Trump and his outer-exurbia Maga country minions hating on cities as "living in hell." I've lived in Seattle since the late 1980s, and lived in Portland and the Bay Area (San Jose) in the early '80s; so I've lived in cities for going on half a century. They've had their problems but their problems are NOT women making reproductive health care decisions for themselves or LGBTQ+ people or immigrants or people of color or minorities or even protesters. Never have been.
Repuglicans right now are weirdly obsessed with punching down at marginalized groups, women, people in drag, people speaking in a different language or with an accent, people protesting state violence in the streets. They maybe always have been bad but they at least haven't been this bad about it in a long time; since America was "great" in their way of thinking, I guess. Project 2025 really is a Handmaid's Tale dystopian nightmare. And despite Trump's denials Project 2025 is in fact a perfect distillation of Trumpism, with the fingerprints of over 200 former officials of the Trump admin all over it.
The biggest problems in the city of Seattle, from my humble perch in the peanut gallery, are living wages, homelessness, and the rich do not want to pony up (with taxes) for obvious infrastructural needs like public housing and green sustainability reforms, and the mayor and political establishment are for some inexplicable reason intimidated by the fascist Trump-endorsing police union.
I'm usually a passive supporter of those "Keep Portland/City X weird" campaigns. So the crucial qualifier here, made by Walz at their Michigan rally, is "creepy" weird. Trump/Vance are creepy weird on steroids. You don't want to hear them talking about your family or anybody else's families. Let's put this creepy weird stuff behind us. We really do have better, more pressing, things to do.