AIG

The fact that AIG decided to use $165M of government bailout money to pay bonuses is infuriating. Now, those who know me might be surprised to hear me say this. But there are a couple of things at play. There should not have been a government bailout in the first place. We would not even be dealing with this question. But given that there was a bailout, and that we did pay for it, a properly managed company should have stopped paying bonuses long before it needed a government bailout. AIG says that they are contractually obligated to pay these bonuses. Well, someone didn't do their job and wrote a lousy contract. Any contract worth the paper it's written on ought to have a clause that says if business is in the toilet, bonuses go out the window, end of story. I guess it's the whole bubble thing -- if they tried to write it into the contract, the people getting the bonuses would have hightailed down the road to BJH or some such. And who is paying for this nonsense now? We are. Which brings me back to my first point -- there shouldn't have been a bailout in the first place.

Tindersticks

Went to see Tindersticks at the 9:30 club Thursday night. My friend C.S., who originally introduced me to the band a few years ago, came up with the idea. I can’t say I was a huge fan before – C.S. burned some CDs for me, a couple of compilations of what he thought were the best songs – and I enjoyed listening to them now and then, but I never took the time to learn more about the band or explore other recordings. So I didn’t actually have a burning desire to go on Thursday, but I’m sure glad I did; the concert proved to be excellent.

Tindersticks are virtually unknown in the US. They got a lot of critical acclaim for their early records in the mid- and late-1990s, but it remained confined largely to the UK. They went on a hiatus over the last couple of years, but did release a new record in 2008, which is what prompted this tour, mostly around Europe with a few dates in the US.

What drew me to the band originally was their sound – far more distinctive than just about all of their contemporaries, not that I really have a good idea of what those sound like, not having followed the British rock and pop scene in any meaningful way since Catherine Wheel and Ride in the early nineties. First, there is lead singer Stuart Staples’ baritone – deep, clear, and far lower-pitched than a typical, or even an atypical, rock singer, it has some Jim Morrison in it, maybe a little Steve Kilbey of the Church, but is really all his own. Occasionally, Staples sings falsetto, but because his voice is so low to begin with, the falsetto takes on an immediately recognizable quality. His voice draws you in instantly – I remember getting into C.S.’s car one night several years ago and hearing it on the car stereo. My reaction was, “who is THIS?”

Then there is the band itself. I stand by my claim that nothing in rock and pop is ever truly original, but a few bands do come closer than the rest once in a great while, and Tindersticks definitely fall into that category. I guess they’ve absorbed so many influences, and digested them so thoroughly, that something approaching uniqueness emerged. There is some lounge in there, a little progressive pretense, some folksy songwriting, all sprinkled with just a dash of sixties’ psychedelia and postmodern jam-band sound. In addition to traditional rock instruments, played with admirable restraint I should point out, the band frequently uses a vibraphone, strings and a variety of horns, though they rarely get truly orchestral. Above all, their sound is beautifully clear – Tindersticks are the anti-noise, anti-Radiohead wing of British rock.

The most amazing thing was that all of this came across when they played live. They sounded phenomenal on stage. They were never loud or bombastic. Every instrument, and Staples’ voice, was crystal-clear. They played, I am shocked to say, with something I did not think was possible in rock – taste. The acoustic instruments were there, too – the keyboardist doubled on vibraphone and another high-pitched tuned percussion instrument I couldn’t quite see – some sort of miniature glockenspiel perhaps – and a trumpeter, a saxophonist (baritone!) and a cellist occupied stage right, appearing and disappearing as the tunes required.

The entire concert was a brand-new experience for me. I did not recognize a single tune. But that is perhaps the greatest testament to the show’s success – I was drawn in instantly and stayed focused the entire time. It was almost like going back to the days before recording existed, when listening to music at all meant listening live. Not all songs were great as songs – in fact, some were quite monotonous when stripped of their arrangements, but of course the arrangements were an integral part, and if nothing else, Staples’ voice kept me listening. They played a few instrumentals, something they are known for, and those sounded good as well, though for once, I wish the instrumentalists soloed more, especially the horns. The trumpeter took a couple of solos, but the sax player, who turned out to be the fairly well-known Terry Edwards, stuck mostly to playing counterpoint to the rest of the band, and the cellist’s job, aside from a beautifully minimalist, Steve Reich-like intro, was to provide color.

I did wonder about the economics of the concert. There were eight musicians on stage, plus roadies, but the tickets were only $25, a bargain in this day and age, and the club, admittedly fairly large, was maybe one-third full. 250 people at the most, by my very imprecise estimate. The audience was refreshingly tame and polite, clapping enthusiastically, and letting out a few quiet whistles between songs, but otherwise listening attentively. The whole thing had kind of an MTV Unplugged air about it. The concession stand, in another pleasant surprise, was selling the new record on LP, as well as colored vinyl 7-inch of one of Terry Edwards' side projects, which turned out to be a revival of the eighties ska band Department S. I bought both, but have not heard either yet, my turntable being in need of some attention.

Anyway, great show. Very un-rock-n-roll, and that’s precisely why I enjoyed it so much.

Midnight Oil (not the band)

I feel young again, coming home around midnight after a show at the 9:30 club, eating a bowl of instant noodles, firing up the laptop and doing some late night work. I'll pay for it in the morning, no doubt.

David Remnick

Finished David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire a few days ago. Excellent. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Remnick, now at the New Yorker magazine, was the Washington Post's Moscow correspondent from the fall of 1987 until the fall of 1991, and though he did not originally bargain for it, ended up witnessing the dissolution of the Soviet Union first-hand.

Remnick is first and foremost a journalist, and the book is written that way - quick pacing, lots of direct quotations, personal observations - but his chief accomplishment is that he does not neglect history. On the contrary, Lenin's Tomb is an excellent primer on Soviet history. Any reader who wants not just the basics but a hefty dose of historical analysis, compellingly written, could do a lot worse than this book. Though his focus is, obviously, on the Gorbachev years, he really leaves no period untouched, especially the Stalin era. In fact, the major conclusion of the book that will still be worth something generations from now is that Gorbachev's first, and greatest, accomplishment, was that he allowed ordinary Russians to regain their history. As George Orwell, among many others, has pointed out a long time ago, any totalitarian regime could survive only as long as it had complete control of the society's historical knowledge. Once people really learned what happened and why, it was all over. So in that sense, as Remnick is keenly aware, Gorbachev was bound to lose control over the transformations he himself had started, which, of course, was exactly what happened.

Another of Remnick's achievements is the attention he pays to the reactionary elements in Soviet sociaety and the Communist Party, first and foremost of which was, of course, the KGB. Many Westerners still think of the KGB as Russia's equivalent of the CIA, but it was far more than that. It was the CIA, the FBI and something that no modern democracy has (a recent blip in Maryland notwithstanding) - honest to goodness secret police, in the sense of internal espionage - rolled into one. I am grateful to Remnick for making that abundantly clear.

Remnick's faults are few. In the introduction, he expresses hope for the continued democratization of Russia, and in that he has been proven wrong already. And though I am tempted to ask how someone with as deep an understanding of the Soviet system and Russian society as he is could do that, I will chalk it up to his inherently American sense of optimism. He does include something darkly prophetic in the book, perhaps without realizing entirely just how significant it is. In the city of Perm, the former site of a large Gulag camp, he interviews the mayor:

"There will be a dictatorship soon," he said with a certain relish in his voice. "It won't be the Communist Party organs, it will be the real organs - the KGB. They will try to develop the economy, but there will be a strict discipline." (p. 276)

My only other complaint, irrelevant to the general reader, is his rendering into English of certain Russian words and phrases. His Russian is obviously fluent, idiomatic even, but I've seen this elsewhere -- perhaps there is an unwritten imperative among scholars of Russia to use the closest cognate when translating certain words where a much more common and sensible English word would not only work, but actually make more sense. Thus, he translates the common salutation "Uvazhayemy" (sorry, I have no good way to quote Cyrillic at the moment) as "Respected," which is literally correct, but wouldn't you use "Esteemed" to address someone? Similarly, and more misleadingly, "rayon" becomes "region" instead of "district." It is true that sometimes the problem is intractable. He renders the extremely evocative, strong and sharp "avanteurist" as "adventurer." Not even close, but my Oxford Concise Russian Dictionary agrees, and I suppose there is no better solution short of resorting to a third language.

Keith Jarrett

I had always wondered how ECM Records funded itself. Its catalog is vast, its production values are extremely high, but the commercial appeal of its artists, even in Europe, is, in the grand scheme of things, limited. Now I think I know - whenever the label needs money, they release another recording by Keith Jarrett, then sit back and watch his rabid fans gobble it up, lining the label's coffers.

I'm really starting to think that Jarrett has managed to attain that enviable position where critics and listeners alike stopped trying at anything resembling objectivity. It doesn't matter what he plays. He achieves instant holiness just by touching the keyboard.

His latest recording is Yesterdays, with his usual trio of Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. Though released a couple of weeks ago, it was recorded back in 2001, so clearly it is from the vaults. I was initially drawn to it because it was purported to be available on LP - the first new recording ECM has issued on vinyl in fifteen years. Turned out the LP was not officially available in the US, and to get it from Europe would have cost me €30 plus trans-Atlantic shipping. But by the time I found this out, I was convinced, on no basis whatsoever, that I had to hear it. So I got a copy of the CD.

While Yesterdays is not bad per se, it is definitely not essential. Turns out Jarrett's trio has released several other trio records since my last acquisition --1999's Whisper Not. Yesterdays is just another link in a seemingly endless chain. Everything they play here they have played before. The songs are all standards - their stock in trade these days - and while everyone plays competently, and I normally love standards, it is just not that interesting. The band grooves, Peacock plays some tasteful solos, and DeJohnette tosses off some pretty wild stuff now and then without ever losing the beat, but as a whole package it doesn't make me go "wow." I suspect one of the major problems is Jarrett's infamous humming and moaning. I realize that anyone who is going to listen to him in any quantity is going to have to live with it and learn to listen through it. But on Yesterdays it seems louder and far more distracting than on any other record I've heard. I've played the disc all the way through a few times now, both through the speakers and on headphones, and it still grates in a major way.

To give credit where it is due, the last two tracks come a ways towards redeeming the record. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is lovingly played, with one of those floating, harmonically ambiguous extended intros that used to be Jarrett's trademark but have not been heard much since he recovered from a major illness in the 1990s. "Stella By Starlight," recorded during a sound check (the rest of the record is live), is more uptempo, but Jarrett is still a bit restrained, not only articulating extremely well (he usually does), but holding back from gratuitously long and fast passages. Download those two from a music source of your choice and forget the rest, I say.

Theodore Dalrymple

Finished Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple a few days ago. Enjoyed it, if that’s the right word. I read quickly, without taking notes, so I can’t get into too much detail, but here are a few reactions.

Dalrymple is a psychiatrist in Birmingham, where he practices in an inner-city hospital and, part-time, in a prison. The book is a collection of essays originally published in magazines, primarily City Journal, that describe his interactions with his patients and proceed to infer from these interactions certain generalizations about these people’s lives. The subtitle of the book is “The Worldview that Makes the Underclass,” and while the term “underclass” is easier on an English ear than an American one, it does capture Dalrymple’s intent better than any American equivalent could. These people are poor, but only in government’s definition (specifically, England’s essentially socialist government). As measured against history and, more importantly, against current economic conditions in much of the rest of the world, these people’s level of economic comfort, in many cases provided government programs, is far above basic. They are not, in a vast majority of cases, homeless. There is no official policy of discrimination against them the way there was in, say, the Jim Crow American South (often quite the opposite, Dalrymple argues). So perhaps “underclass” is an apt term to capture the general cultural and moral decrepitude he describes.

The book is not prescriptive. It is neither a scientific report nor a policy paper. Dalrymple merely describes his experiences, sometimes citing individual cases, other times describing his observations in the community (to his great credit, he lives among those he studies). His argument is essentially this. The vast majority of the underclass finds itself in the position it is in not through any sort of misfortune, unfairness, or circumstances beyond its control. On the contrary, its predicament is a direct result of specific moral choices. It is enabled – nay, encouraged – to believe that it is acceptable, and even desirable, to make such choices by pervasive government policy that deemphasizes individual responsibility in favor of being provided for by society as a whole in the name of fairness. This policy was, for decades, promulgated by liberal intellectuals, both in academia and politics. The net result is a moral and intellectual collapse that goes far beyond the loss of “traditional values” and permeates one’s very notion of right and wrong.

Some of Dalrymple’s claims and examples do come across as faintly ridiculous. In a chapter dedicated to tattoos, he claims that in his experience, there is a universal correlation between tattoos and criminality. He seems to recognize the silliness of his suggestion – the tone of the essay seems to say, “look, I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t help it – this is what I see in front of me every day” – but a reality check would have still been useful. I personally have an acquaintance who, while tattooed, is a hard worker, a dedicated mother and a loving wife, and another who, while far less tattooed than the first, is a promising scientist and a dedicated researcher. My sample size is smaller than Dalrymple’s, I realize, but it still shows that it pays to slow down now and then when making generalizations.

On balance, however, Dalrymple’s observations are sharp, informative, and successful precisely because while he does, to a point, blames (correctly, I believe) the members of the underclass for making the choices they make, the bulk of his blame is reserved, also correctly in my opinion, for the rotten intellectual climate among the social elite that made these choices possible in the first place.

NSO

I seem to be in permanent catch-up mode these days.

Went to hear the NSO a couple of weeks ago. Interesting program – Stravinsky's Jeu de Cartes, Crumb's A Haunted Landscape and Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. Stravinsky was fun – great wind parts, especially bassoon, a good horn solo, and an amusing quote from Rossini's Barber of Seville towards the end. It was the Crumb that made the concert worthwhile, though. I have mostly avoided his music, largely on the basis of his reputation for an almost complete lack of structure. Landscape, though, was worth hearing, and it absolutely had to be heard live. The work is a percussionist's wet dream. Every percussion instrument was dragged out for the occasion, including ethnic instruments not normally seen in an orchestra. The structure was predictably lacking, the orchestration sparse in the extreme, and the melodic content equally minimal. The basic pattern was a sequence of short pairwise solos, with one conventional and one percussion instrument in each. It was all about sound in its pure form, and as long as you approached the work with that in mind, it was fascinating. What made hearing it live essential was the fact that we could see the percussionists reach for their next instrument. The stage was partially obscured from our usual perch in the chorister, but we saw enough to build anticipation. Had we been listening on record, the sounds would have seemed random. I don't know that I need to hear the work again – it is too fragmented to serve as ambient music, and too abrasive for repeated active listening, but experiencing it once was definitely worth it.

The second half of the concert was Lief Ove Andsnes playing Rachmaninoff. He played well, at least as far as we could tell. The main distinguishing feature of the work, to me, is the fact that the soloist and the orchestra are almost always playing together, the way they might in a Baroque concerto, as opposed to alternating solo and tutti sections common to Romantic concertos. This is interesting. Unique at the time it was written, in fact. The problem was that from where we were sitting, we could barely hear the piano most of the time, so much of the solo part was lost to us. Still, I had to give it to Rachmaninoff for some gorgeous string parts, which sounded fresh since I haven't heard the concerto in years, even though I have an LP of Horowitz playing it. I wish I had pulled it out – had I been reminded of the mass of sound that it is most of the time, I might have splurged for orchestra seats.