Rewind Find, or Why You're Gonna Love Eileen

It probably was time for hair metal to die.  The movement ("movement?" really?) started earlier than most think -- Van Halen was its progenital band, perhaps its best, and their first album came out in '78.  '78 -- just nine years removed from Woodstock.  Just a year after the Sex Pistol's Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977).  It's said, sometimes, that punk killed metal.  Not at all.  Punk was in fact a little metal itself, and the hair metal movement was just an extension of some of the moves Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and the Guess Who had been up to since the late '60s and early '70s anyway.

That said, what hair.  What mascara. (Mascara? Yup, mascara.)  (Oh yeah; Nirvana did it -- killed hair metal.  Soundgarden's Louder than Love [a masterpiece album] was out by '89, but it was Nirvana that killed hair metal with the überpopularity of Nevermind. Right; back to the mascara.)  Rock and roll bad-assness had always had its badass quality because it made you pause for a moment and think.  Elvis was badass in the '50s because, well, was it true?  Was frowning and shaking our heads at shaking teenage hips really a reflection of our own repression?  (It was.)  The Doors were badass because maybe society was so screwed that a long acid trip was just as valid as anything one might do with a "normal" life (the Vietnam War was on, after all).  The Sex Pistols were badass because maybe counterculture had become too predicable.  Counter-counterculture may have veered off into randomness.  However, at least it made you think about what counterculture was.

Brett Michaels.  Nikki Sixx.  The guys from Cinderella (a better band than you'd think, by the way).  Great White.  White Lion.  Winger.  Whitesnake.  Warrant.  (What was with all the "Ws"?)  When those dudes came out looking like ladies, as Steven Tyler and Co. so epically put it, it was tough to tell what was going on.  It was the '80s.  There was something of a Western hangover after Vietnam and malaise from the intensity of the politicization of everything.  It was, apparently, ok to be wealthy again.  Things should sell, and parties should be had.  Just to party.  Not to make a "statement."

Partying in the '80s involved a lot of barfing in swimming pools and tons of coke.  That itself wasn't wildly different.  However, the fact that it was just about swimming pools and coke was.  It was vapid through and through.  When Fredric Jameson wrote his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991, it was  this culture he had in mind.  It wasn't the networked, Internet, immediate simulation of everything culture we have today; the book was too early for that.  It was a vapid 1980s culture referring to nothing.  No social meaning, no sense of change and no solidarity. The nadir was Britny Fox.  If you're not blinded by the glint of the stage light off the top of their mega-perms in "Girls' School," you've got stronger eyes than I.

Still, what did come next?  Depression?  More drug habits -- just without the fun?  Power ballads where one just took the shine off the production values and asked for scratchy vocals instead of the operatics of the post-Plant generation? (Sorry; that's what Pearl Jam's "Daughter" is -- a power ballad.)  I'm not convinced.  If you're going to have a coke habit, have a COKE habit.  With some ladies (or dudes if you are a lady, or just swing that way if you're a dude).  Rockers have been depressed since John Lennon.  It's not new.

That leaves the music.  From the perspective of critics and musicians who wanted poetry with their music, hair metal stunk.  Endless weedling on guitars (though most songs clocked in around four minutes; hardly Yes-like marathons).  The words did stink ("A school bell rings off the day, brings in a stray, a few girls at play" [our friends from Britny Fox]).  At its best -- and the best all-around artifact from the era is Van Halen's 1984 -- hair metal could give a slightly dark insight into the culture of nothing; of hedonism and so-called virtuosity.  That was awfully rare, though.  Most of the time we were stuck with Warrant's "Cherry Pie" and Kip Winger's odes to "sparks" coming from the "corner of his eye" at a girl it turns out (surprise, surprise) who was "only seventeen."

Still, some of those dudes could play.  And not just the guys from VH.  When they balanced the production the right way -- and sometimes they did -- there could come some awfully crunchy hard-rockin' stuff that saved you from the darkness of thrash and death metal (indeed, hair metal was always extremely melodic) yet blew the doors off with an awfully rich tonal sound.  It was also ok to know how to play the guitar.  There wasn't much material for the bass players and drummers; it was mostly straight up rock beats with the occasional shuffle (and everything -- absolutely everything -- was in four).  Some of the guitar pyrotechnics were pretty pyroctechnical, though.  Guys from Ratt to Whitesnake to Tesla to even our brothers from Winger came up with some pretty inventive riffs.  It was a bit like getting in a Corvette.  Overdone?  Yes.  Potentially inelegant?  Yeah.  When done right, though, it was like jamming your foot to the bottom on one of those things and just feeling it explode under you.  Anybody had to smile.

That brings us to Steelheart.  It seems that Steelheart had a hit towards the end of all this:  1989's "Never Let You Go" from their eponymously titled debut album.  I don't remember it.  Apparently it climbed to #16 on the U.S. charts.  They released one more album, 1992's Tangled in Reins, before their lead singer got clocked in the head with a boom opening for Slaughter.  There's a very, very fine line before hair metal turns into a massive parody of itself (a very fine line).  That's a line not captured by the 1984 "rockumentary" This is Spinal Tap (with an umlaut placed over the "n") -- that parody was bit more on the '70s -- but this later Tap video, "The Majesty of Rock."   As a singer, Van Halen's David Lee Roth lived on that boundary line; he was almost a running joke about the genre.  However, Roth was backed by a pretty serious band that balanced out the whole affair.  As an entire group, though, Steelheart, totally unwittingly, ran the entire operation as absolutely right up to the border between parody and real music as possible.  Put the needle down on "Like Never Before" from Steelheart, and you'll begin by hearing the absolute prototype -- almost like it would be taught in hair metal school -- of the high tenor hard rock howl that was a prerequisite for every singer of that generation.  But it is prototypical; indeed, archetypical.  To a tee.  Like you have a hard rock coach in your living room teaching you how to go "Ooooooh" after being kicked in the nuts but still have it be singing.  That's before the band kicks in with absolutely textbook, perfectly distorted hard rock riffs with a ridiculously miked drum kit (there's no better example than "Everybody Loves Eileen," also from Steelheart).  It's a joke.  A total joke.  That is, if they didn't do it so well.

From a player's and riff perspective, there's some surprisingly good music to come from a handful of the bands from that era -- including bands not named Van Halen.  Ratt had a couple of rockin' tunes.  Tesla's "Edison's Medicine" has some pretty inventive stuff.  Lynch Mob has a forgotten couple of albums very much worth a listen from if you like electric guitar.  Even Winger's "Seventeen" starts with some absolutely killer chord changes.  Steelheart -- essentially forgotten (and in many ways justifiably so) -- comes with the whole package.  For every kid who ever sat in his bedroom in 1988 and thought "man, I'd love to have a ROCKIN' band and just, you know, totally ROCK," Steelheart actually made those albums.  Two of them.  Just as you'd imagine them.  They did it picture perfectly, and then the music died.

Steelheart's Steelheart and Tangled in Reins (7/10)

Vox Populi

Two exhibitions might have helped define the world of modern art:  the 1913 Armory Show, organized by the Association of American Painters at the Lexington Street National Guard Armory in New York -- introducing Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism to broad public audiences (it was advertised as the "new spirit" in art [figures like Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse and Picasso gained their first exposure to major North American publics]) -- and Hitler's 1937 exhibition of "degenerate art" in Munich, exhibiting the work of some of the exact same artists, or their inheritors, as examples of "dilettantism" and that ever-dangerous Jewish imagination.  You know -- the Jewish imagination that apparently ran the worldwide banking conspiracy and the Bolshevik revolution at the same time.  The American exhibition was relatively well-received.  Publics were shocked but interested; after New York, the show made its way to Chicago and Boston.  The Munich show was really well-received.  More than two million people went through its doors on its four  month run.  Down the street, Hitler put on another shindig with his favorite Nazi artists; happy farmers and Teutons with bulging muscles.  About a tenth as many people went to that.

The Neue Galerie, on New York's Upper East Side, has recently replicated Hitler's show based on what few pieces it was able to get its hands on -- some Klees, some Kirchners, some Kokoschkas (trouble makers, all of them).  The New Yorker reports in its March 24 issue that the exhibition also features a room with large empty frames formerly housing works by many of the same artists, probably destroyed during the War -- vanished into illicit black markets, or burned in that great symbolic gesture often used from inquisitions to anti-Semitic purges: tossing intellectually important artifacts onto a fire.  The "degenerate" show is a heck of a thing to try to reproduce.  Art in the first decades of the twentieth century was surrounded by torsion; how do you represent the human being on occasions when the West and the world were about to make themselves into a "slaughter bench," as philosopher G.W.F. Hegel once termed it -- and technology and politics were moving to extremes of space, time and logic which human minds were not used to comprehending?

Of course, looking back now, we can see the significance of daring strikes to remake representation; to tear the human being down to his or her psychological soul, as so many at the start of the twentieth century were prone to do, or simply contemplate the very nature (and possibility) of a straight line or whether the color blue (or any other color) made sense anymore (as more than a few were also prone to do in those years).  "Artists before their times," we might say; free spirits in search of publics, or because of their daring and "larger" society's lack of comprehension, figures doomed to be misunderstood and experience the pain of persecution before acceptance.  It's a funny thing with the popular mind or voice, though; that which can vote (sometimes hyper) nationalist parties into power, descend into the illogic of pogroms or bandy about anti-intellectualism over dinner tables.  It's the same people, at least in some cases, who can detect free expression when they see it and whose curiosity can be the beginning of acceptance even when acceptance is more curiosity than acceptance to begin with.  The art, and memorialization, at the Neue Galerie, is undoubtedly important and a historical monument worth noting.  The most significant monument, however, might be the faint echoes of the footsteps of the more than two million people who saw the show that one can still hear if one puts one's ear up to history.  Indeed, their footsteps echo especially loudly when compared with the very few footsteps echoing through the halls of the show Hitler and his cronies wanted us to see -- silence around art no one really wanted.  Seventy-seven years later, footsteps in an art gallery, of all places, ring like the sound of distant yet constant truth; the possibility of human insight subverting the worst attempts to deliver truths that, in the end, aren't really that.

Heimat

In an article from the 1990s, the sociologist Roland Robertson coined the term "glocalization."  There are massive forces in the world making us the same, he argued -- consumerism is high on the chart -- and the worlds of international organizations, "third way" politics and intense levels of electrified, postmodern communications brings us together.  However, they (at least can) help us lose senses of who we are; "alienation," as so many German philosophers described it, is a common modern experience.  Sometimes we react.  Sometimes, in reaction to globalization, we create nationalisms.  We refer to ancient customs; we seek to make ourselves different from others.  We react to globalization by invoking our small scale provincial mentalities and primitive subconsciences.  Sometimes we bring those mentalities into national and international politics; those can be scary moments -- moments when societies rip themselves into two along lines of left and right.  In any case, the local makes the global more complex.  Bringing the local into the picture means globalizaton concerns heterogenization as much as homogenization.  We pull away from each other as much as we pull together.  That's because globalization's "together" sometimes doesn't feel like our together -- one we own.

Underneath the local and provincial, Robertson argues, is nonetheless an impulse not just representing backwater reactionary mentalities.  The local concerns, he argues, a sense of home -- the attempt to find a place where you belong.  Feelings about that are tough to account for as they are intuitive and learned.  They are real, though, and help give us that last 5% of who we are.  That's as we fight against the anomie, washes of anonymity and senses of disorientation modern life can often provide.  An interesting thought is how to join home and  cosmos; the global metropole and the tribe from which one comes -- to find a love that can flow through both, drawing from the countryside's quiet while using the vibrancy of the global city to spread love's essence and break down the boundary lines between its locales.  As The Circumstance; goes home today, those thoughts are very much in the air.

Ban-zai?

A former kamikaze pilot -- yeah, there are a few left (some guys missed) -- turns out to be in possession of quite a  number of letters written by fellow World War II suicide pilots just before they got in their planes and did their thing.  Their "thing," of course, was a one way trip to oblivion.  Funny; hidden behind the grainy textures of black and white, given enough distance between now and then (seventy years or so) and made part of the mystical experience of a "great generation" (Second World War twenty-somethings), kamikazes don't seem so dangerous.  What's funny about it is that we get the pants scared off of us today when a generation of young men wraps headbands around their foreheads and dictates their last testaments.  Jihad; glory to the Emperor -- where does the difference lie?

Tadamasa Itatsu is in possession of some extremely unique documents:  the writings of young men who knew they were about to die in a fruitless, last ditch attempt to defend Japan from a country (the U.S) to whom it knew it was going to lose (kamikaze flights started in 1944 -- the last year or so of the War).  The letters are remarkable; they are to families, friends and loved ones, expressing last thoughts.  They tell why one chose to do what one was going to do.  They made manifestations of personal philosophy.  Some letters jar -- strident defenses of empire and glory.  Other letters are remarkable in their acknowledgement of the Japanese system as corrupt and outdated.  Some ask for more universal, democratic principles.  The power of the state and culture, though, was such that the few guys taking the last positions got into planes and flew themselves into the sides of boats anyway (well, decks, mostly).

The Japanese city of Minami Kyushu is asking UNESCO -- the UN's educational and cultural organization -- to grant the letters world heritage status.  World heritage status grants a kind of canonized status to cultural, and sometimes natural, artifacts.  World heritage sites and artifacts are protected by the Geneva convention.  No bombing that stuff.  The Chinese don't like the smell of it.  As with almost anything concerning Japan in the Second World War, China feels Japan should keep away from self-celebratory gestures, if not adopt positions of virtually eternal apology.  Westerners can do well to remember that from Chinese perspectives, the Second World War started in 1937 -- not 1939.  What would eventually happen in Poland had been well underway in China for a couple of years before Hitler swung into action, if not before.

Questions of historical memory are sticky.  The Chinese regularly get annoyed with the Japanese in that department -- over school textbooks, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visiting the Yasukuni Shrine; the one that memorializes Japan's war dead, including some ugly characters from the 1930s and '40s.  In relation to the Crimea situation, the Russians are throwing around the word "fascist" like it's summer 1941.  The Simon Wiesenthal Center is still hunting Nazis.  Morally valid actions?  No doubt.  I don't know if there should be a statute of limitations on human rights violations.  Occasionally, however, it can be worth remembering the power of being the ones who won -- you won.  No quarter should be given to the Slobodan Milosevices or Ratko Mladices of the world; they should be tried and jailed (though not put to death; that violates the same principles for which they should be brought to trial -- questions of the right to life).  There is, though, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years later an invisible line one crosses where the cause of world peace and the best possible conditions for human rights are served by forgetting.  Forgetting not what happened, but the anger that causes one to condemn.  Condemning happens in the present.  As time goes by, historical pictures gets blurred; things become more complicated than they appear.  The letters Mr. Itatsu wants to bring to the world's attention are like that -- the stories of men, some brainwashed by an over-zealous empire, some trembling in fear at what they were about to do, some knowing it was wrong.  I don't know about world heritage artifact.  It seems, though, there is undoubtedly an artifact there to be preserved, and one that could perhaps even be utilized as a site of forgiveness.  Sometimes you have to say "Banzai!" and jump into the letting go.

Look Out, Toronto

The Russians have showed up in the Ukraine.  Well, we think.  No one seems to want to take off their balaclava long enough to answer any questions and let us know for sure.  Yanukovych is broadcasting from inside Russia.  He'll be back, he says.  No he won't; not unless the Russian army brings him back -- and while they were happy enough to take a few extra steps into Georgia in the South Ossetia War (2008), they do risk someone responding if anyone drives a tank the 900 kilometers from Moscow to Kiev.  Kiev is, says Yanukovych, where "bandits" are in charge.

Enough about a leader about whom we'll soon hear no more.  True, it is dangerous for Russia to extend its sabre rattling too far beyond its borders; though a resurgent nationalism seems to be empowering Putin to take distinctly controversial stances on a wide range of domestic and international issues -- controversial from European and North American perspectives anyway (though some issues might not be so controversial in Arizona) -- there still seems to be an expectation that no one will transgress too far over the post-Cold War norm that, in fact, the Cold War is over (in other words, the nuclear guns are put away, and the U.S. and Russia will both show up and shake hands at G8 summits).  Barak Obama is "deeply concerned" about the men in balaclavas.  Not exactly DEFCON 1 -- or even the DEFCON 2 America's Air Force sat at for a few moments during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Putin might win this one.  A few troops in Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea?  Even more than a few, yet in places many in the West can't quite make sense of?  No problem; the borderlands ("Ukraine" literally means "borderland") are a site of impunity; only regional actors themselves might do something.  Even more disorientingly, it might only be paramilitaries of some kind or another that show up for the fray -- scruffy men in beards doing things in names of ancient blood fueds connected to pasts modern political ideologies try to get rid of.  About to run into a serious financial crisis in the midst of a national unity meltdown, Kiev won't be able to do much either.  The EU is like the UN; it's great at wagging fingers.  Maybe it will sanction someone.

There was a time when, if one superpower grabbed a piece of turf somewhere, the other was ready to ride in somewhere else.  Had the U.S. invaded Cuba when Castro and Khrushchev decided Havana had just the right number of palm trees and sugar cane for nuclear missile launches, there was a good chance the Soviets and their allies would have moved on Berlin.  Putin's going to take the Crimea?  I say America, take Toronto.  The borderlands are, after all, a site of impunity.

Insane in the Ukraine, or When History Crosses its Wires

Well, Yanukovych is definitely out.  No one, it seems, can find the man.  They can find a menagerie of animals intended to make a strange brand of foie gras apparently only to be eaten by foreign dignitaries and the wealthiest of the wealthy in that immense and deadly flat land.*  But no Yanukovych.  And the Crimea is in the news in ways it hasn't been since the 1850s.

Samuel Huntington, the guy who said that the reality of the post-Cold War world was a "clash of civilizations" (and come the War on Terror, boy did he seem right), would love what's going on there now.  In Simferopol, Crimea's regional capital, ethnic Russians wrestled with Tartar Muslims who would now like to be part of Europe (not exactly known for welcoming Muslims with open arms).  The Russians would like to return to Russia; a state from which they seceded not thirty years ago.**  The Russians who would like to join Vladimir Putin's semi-authoritarian patriotocracy see the half democratic coalition in Kiev as "fascists" -- which some of them are as they embrace a hyper-nationalistic "Ukraine for the Ukrainians" idea (and of course, the Russians in the Ukraine should be Ukrainians, think the fascists [who are now apparently multiculturalists]).  The cosmopolitan democrats, of course, look down on all of them.  "Our first goal," said one high modernistic enlightened soul on the BBC today, "is to unite the country."  No it's not.  It's to make it into the just-like-every-other-liberal democratic fantasyland you imagine represents progress.  It's really just more shopping.  Putin, meanwhile, is doing naval exercises in the Black Sea.  Which is a lake.  I think it's a lake, anyway.

The ideological wires are so simultaneously interlaced and dispersed in the Ukraine it's very hard to make heads or tails of anything except that vague historical memories have taken their revenge on contemporary politics.  In American presidential elections in 2008 and 2012, a weird right -- I won't call it an extreme right; "weird" will do -- sometimes liked to refer to Obama as a "fascist" and "communist" simultaneously.  That amounted largely to a "something I've heard about from the past I think I know about but I'm not sure but I have a feeling so I say it out loud" kind of thing.  Things run a little differently in the Ukraine.  In all of the former Soviet Union, but very much the Ukraine because of how much of the Second World War's eastern European theater was fought there (and how brutal the fighting was), "fascism" means serious things.  Rather than random historical imagination, it means destroyed families.  It means questions of collaboration.  It means scorched earth retreat policies.  It means holocaust and violent, underground resistance. However, with the forces of history which produced an ideological collapse where we don't have fascists and communists anymore -- and to even say "liberal" or "democratic" rings a bit hollow as those ideas don't have anything to oppose (we kind of just are) -- the cauldron of jumbled historical imagination is being stirred even in the Ukraine.  In the Crimea specifically, where Lord Cardigan, as immortalized by Lord Tennyson (lordy, lordy), encouraged his hosts to charge "half a league, half a league, half a league onward."  Political contest becomes like your college buddy encouraging you to get over your hangover by having another beer; we try to straighten out our political direction by reaching for all the old categories (the ones that kind of put us there in the first place).  It's history's fault; global change made us this way.  At least we know, unlike 1853, that the Sardinians are unlikely to invade.

* The Circumstance; is unsure if foie gras is the intended dish of certain of the domesticated animals intended to be eaten on the Yanukovych estate.  Could be, though, if some are geese.
** Well, twenty-three or twenty-four years ago, depending on whether or not one counts from the independence declaration or the referendum on independence, which was won by a count of roughly 90%-10%.  The Crimea initially declared its own independence; then decided to in fact partner up with the newly independent Ukraine.

Cante, chico...

One of the figures from the flamenco world interviewed today about the death of Paco de Lucia -- one of the truly international stars in flamenco, in part because he crossed over into jazz -- said "you know, flamenco is like the wine; it gets better as you get older."  Undoubtedly.  Flamenco is a unique and dramatic art form.  It demands massive technique.  However, a single note, or held pose, can cut through the flurry of scales and, because that note or pose counterposes the massive set of sounds and gestures the music sets up in your head, it can capture all of them, and make them fall like a single leaf from a bare tree.  Delicate.

I know very little about de Lucia as a traditional flamenco player.  I got to know de Lucia's work through fusion; his records with Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell and others exploring the waters between rock and jazz -- but keeping it jazz -- after Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (1970).  If you know flamenco, you know such work wasn't well-received; it was a betrayal of flamenco, the traditionalists claimed.  Somehow all the wowing of wealthy European and American audiences seemed to divert attention from the full breadth of flamenco; the dance, the costumes -- an art form where clapping is a deeply expressive gesture, as important as any guitar pyrotechnics.

In crossing into jazz and pioneering "new flamenco" with tunes like "Entre dos Aguas," de Lucia nonetheless did for flamenco what Leonard Bernstein would do, around the same time, for classical music:  bring in massive new audiences. A movement in which flamenco became a determined part of world music was birthed; flamenco's vocabularies became necessary learning for any serious guitarist.  As Paco leaves us, we can say, sing, friend; a new generation of music lovers knows this music largely because of you.

Soul Sativa; 7 Hours of Joni Box

The most remarkable voice in the history of pop music might belong to Joni Mitchell.  Rock, pop and folk, while surely belonging to the world of serious art, can be (very) hit and miss.  By nature, as genres (as Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno already argued about jazz in the 1940s), rock, pop and folk are not always designed to provide beauty or insight; especially rock and pop are often equally (if not more) designed to sell.  Indeed, because musicianship is often as untrained as trained, rock, pop and folk often have as much to do with their poetry -- the words -- as their music.  One can be in dangerous territory there; what happens when one has bad music and bad words?

It's a grab bag; it can be quite difficult to know who to take seriously stylistically, expressionistically and poetically in the troubador genre.  Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan have always been taken dead seriously; later in their careers, they have been showered with honors from Presidential Medals of Freedom to PEN Awards.  As writers, spokespeople and expressionists, one gets it; cliché or not, they found words that spoke to generations and hit on topical issues.  Figures like Cohen, Dylan -- maybe Springsteen in his own way -- sought to, and in the end did, speak for others. Mitchell's journey was always more personal; it was a woman in man's world.  It was a woman who exhibited strength, yet always wanted one thing; perhaps two:  love and belonging.  Joni sang about the torsion of such emotions, as well as the fairy tale dreams they could bring.  Though she also wrote about topical issues -- the environment in "Big Yellow Taxi," for example (from 1970's Ladies of the Canyon ["they paved paradise and put up a parking lot," wrote Joni]) -- heartbreak, its ironies and the meaning of a woman's freedom were Mitchell's real territory.  She sought to lead no revolution.  Joni made little philosophy.  She made a good deal of psychology, though.

What set Joni apart -- though she was in fact an excellent lyricist ("You turn me on, I'm a radio," wrote Joni on 1972's For the Roses; genius) -- was that she was twice, three times, maybe four, the musician of most her contemporaries.  The closest to Mitchell's harmonic sensibilities at that time (or anytime since) might have been Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young; the adventure into jazz chords, the sound of held suspensions, the sensibility for delayed resolutions and the realization that music can play out over several octaves, and not just one or two.  Unlike CSN, however (and sometimes Y [Mitchell had a relationship with N, incidentally), Joni sang alone.  Mitchell offered one woman's voice with an accompaniment of a full palette of fretted sounds, exploring the full range of the guitar she brought with her.

All of it -- the voice, the funky tunings -- produced remarkable results.  Rhino records -- the label with a penchant for classic retro -- has produced a box set of Mitchell's ten studio albums from 1968-1979.  Drop the needle on the first track and you're immediately in the whole situation.  Just a few bars into "I Had a King" from 1968's Songs to a Seagull, you've been hit with that clear-- perhaps clearer -- than-a-bell tone and Mitchell's broad, folk-expressionistic background.  The '70s saw other great women singers  -- Carole King, Carly Simon, Ricky Lee Jones; queens, undoubtedly.  The distinction was the über-ridiculous purity of Joni's tone and her ear for absolutely endlessly expansive harmonies.  There are pitfalls on those tens studio albums between '68 and '79:  the droning sound of "Tin Angel" from '69's Clouds and the drum-circle, half-spoken word feel of "Dreamland" from '77's Don Juan's Restless Daughter are examples.  Joni Mitchell could misstep.  But by far -- by far -- the better part of those ten albums hits you with moments of unique beauty difficult to find by any musician in any genre, trained, not trained, semi-trained or anywhere in between.  On early albums, because Mitchell was a good guitarist, she accompanied herself well -- gorgeously, often.  Pairing her voice with lush fusion sounds on later albums like Court and Spark (1974) and Hejira (1976) -- and unique masters like Jaco Pastorius -- made for heart stoppingly beautiful and gently funky, artful moments.  The opening bars of Court and Spark's "Help Me," Hejira's "Furry Sings the Blues" or  Mingus' (1979) "The Wolf that Lives in Lindsey" do nothing short of bringing all else to a halt; tonally, they make a guaranteed freeze of time and space and crystallize every thought you have. 1971's Blue -- still in the (mostly) self-accompaniment phase -- is a folk tour-de-force.  It is the work of a unique artist who poses herself as nothing but a woman, looking deeply inside her soul, laying it utterly, totally and beautifully bare for everyone -- everyone -- to see.

Mitchell's career continued after 1979, of course -- though a bit more sporadically.  Her range, as it does for most singers -- especially those puffing on a good half pack of fags a day -- dropped.  She found a lower, slightly bluesier register, working extremely well on powerful records like Turbulent Indigo (1994).  This was a sound previewed ever so slightly on Mingus, available on this box set.  In any case, what Joni and Rhino have done with this collection is give us the rock/pop/folk equivalent of pure oxygen, the cleanest mountain air or maybe a bowl of bodaciously righteous Jack Herer. 7 hours of it.  It's a beautiful and rare collection with which you can spend days, an entire weekend or just save for the moments in life that contain the absolute most meaning for you, or those around you.  I know I will. (10/10)

Rewind Find; or Love the Psychedelic Owl ("Making Memories," by Rush)

A lot of people don't know Rush -- though some certainly do as, outside of the Stones and the Beatles, Rush has sold about as many albums as any band around. 2013 was something of the "Year of Rush" -- a well-received "rockumentary" (Beyond the Lighted Stage, 2010) reengaged the pop music public with a band that always had a significant following, helping to put the group in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  However, Rush never quite edged fully into the mainstream in the same way as other hard rock mavens like Boston and Kansas.  In part, the reason is that Rush was (in fact) less mainstream.  The group had a hint of art rock in it, à la Yes or King Crimson.  It had something to appeal to music school nerds; it's no coincidence the group almost single-handedly spawned the progressive metal movement represented today by groups like Dream Theater.  And well, the group didn't have too many classic albums; 1976's 2112, 1980's Permanent Waves, 1981's Moving Pictures and potentially -- potentially -- 2012's Clockwork Angels (it seems to be heading in that direction, anyway).  Admittedly, the Stones, the Beatles and Zeppelin produced that many classic albums in a few years time -- not a few decades time.

Still, Rush has its niche in pop culture.  For around four decades, the group kept at it with an angular, pseudo-prog hard rock, inspiring legions of air drummers and air guitarists.  They occasionally brought some intensely complex riffs to mainstream radio -- the opening arpeggio to "Spirit of Radio" and the drum fills in "Tom Sawyer" are prime examples.  At the start of it all, though, even after they got über rock god drummer Neil Peart (on their second album, Fly by Night, 1975), Rush still had a significant dose of Zeppelin, good 

-times-on-the-weekend band in them.  For a few minutes of hard rockin' and blowin' out your stereo speakers, check out Fly by Night's "Makin' Memories."  A sweet bouquet of mid-'70s head-bobbin' funkyness from a band that would nonetheless always give you a taste of the progressive monster chops yet to come.  If nothing else, you get to spend a few quality moments with the crazy they-only-made-it-in-the-'70s-shade-of-blue-the-seat-covers-in-my-Pinto-were-once-that-color psychedelic owl with glowing yellow eyes.  Tasty, dogs.  Tasty stuff.

Whither Ukraine

You never want to say that things are likely to happen.  Previous to the July crisis in 1914, for example, not many in Europe would have said that a continent-wide cataclysm was in the making -- and boy was it.  Anyone want to claim credit for foreseeing the revolutions of 1989?  That the system (Eastern European communism) was coming apart at the seams might not have been hard to say.  The precise way -- and speed -- at which events unfolded, however, including on the most auspicious of nights on November 9 in Berlin, was awfully difficult to say one saw coming.  Most Berliners themselves didn't.

The scenes from Independence Square have been horrendous.  The center of an important capital has been turned into a war zone and, aesthetically, it's close to looking like a massive bomb crater; think Janin after the Israelis finished their business in 2002.  Tensions which have been present on Europe's eastern borders essentially since the French Revolution -- between Westernizers and nationalists -- have yanked the country in every conceivable direction.  The coalition which brought down the current, or now recently-departed, president, Victor Yanukovych, bridges the democratic left and the nationalist right.  No one likes the Russians -- though opinions about Europe are divided.  The existence of two Ukraine's has been revealed -- the fault lines between which more or less fall along the Russian-speaking, Ukrainian-speaking divide.  It is very difficult to say who is in charge.  It is even hard to say if the planned May 25 election will actually answer any of those questions.  The Orange Revolution seems to have not left the legacy of democratic stability it intended.  Constitutional amendments from 2004 were undone in 2010 -- and are likely be done again in some form or another.

We stand now in one of those bizarre mid-range situations.  Despite significant support in the country's Russian-speaking regions -- where he is now hiding -- Yanukovych's legitimacy is shot.  He won't be able to govern from Kiev, which would be a bit like trying to hold the Roman Empire together without being able to govern from Rome (some tried; the Empire split).  However, three or four contenders pose as the face of the opposition -- and now there's even more, as cause célèbre Yulia Tymoshenko has been released from prison, directly reentering, so it seems, the political fray.  Some years ago, in light of newly-acquired independence from the Soviet Union, a split Ukraine would have seemed like a bizarre concept.  National independence from a state (the USSR) which downplayed senses of nationhood provided sufficient spirit for national unity.  Once nationalism is released, however, it can multiply.  It did so in Yugoslavia.  Chechnya was one of the most violent places in the world for the better part of two decades because of it.  The potential is there, anyway, for finding that what has been discovered is two Ukrainian nations.  One might move towards Europe.  One might seek to survive as an essential Russian annex.

We have here continuing reverberations of 1989 -- revolutions that led, eventually, to the fall of the Soviet regime in 1991 and the flowering of a range of questions about what the precise shape of ethnically, linguistically and sometimes religiously complex areas would be.  Those are haze-inducing situations as not everyone wants to move towards European-style liberal democracy (and isn't a pisser when it turns out that democratic liberalism isn't a universal value?).  The situation has the potential to get worse before it gets better -- that assuming that anyone has any clear standards about what constitutes "worse" or "better" in relation to not only their own political goals, but that of the health of a multilingual and multiethnic nation in general.

There will be no easy answers in Ukraine.  To make intelligent decisions on whither the state, the central actors will have to be clear with each other about what they want; not just what they oppose.  The hope is that, were that to happen, each party would allow the other the opportunity to create the autonomous political spaces they need to operate such that it would be unnecessary for arms to come out again.  The problems come when everyone claims they are speaking on behalf of all.  No one does.  The question is who is legitimately speaking for whom about what, and what the goals of such a speech are.  This means a clear articulation of where one intends to go and with whom -- that so the "with whom" are able to judge whether or not they would like to participate in what is being proposed for them or not.

Oops; I Meant To...

Word from the art world is that stuff's getting broken in Miami.  The former Miami Art Museum -- now the Pérez Art Museum Miami -- reopened in 2013 on some beautiful premises with some interesting hanging garden architecture.  As part of a row of heavy hitters they got to reinaugurate the museum exhibition-wise, PAMM scored Ai Weiwei, one of the more recognizable names in the contemporary arts.  Broader publics might know Ai a bit less for the relatively broad portfolio he has than his consultancy on the Olympic stadium in Beijing for the 2008 summer games and the tense relationship he maintains with the Chinese authorities (he's been in and out of trouble of various stripes for the past few years).  I'm not sure I heard right on an interview with him on the BBC this morning.  However, if I did, since he became a critic of the Chinese system, he's been subtly denied the right to show in his home country.

In an ongoing show at the Perez, some nudnik (yup, let's just get straight to the point) picked up one of parts (a vase) in a work entitled (strangely enough) "Colored Vases" (thank you, Mr. Ai, for not calling it "Sunday Interlopers on Heightened Moonbeams 7") and dropped it.  The nudnik has a name -- you can read it in The New York Times, if you're curious enough.  He said he didn't think the Pérez, making a play for the big time, shows enough local artists.  He's probably right.  Community outreach isn't exactly the raison d'être of the crème de la crème world of the haute arts (I hope I used enough French there).

Word has it the "Vases" installation could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, U.S.  Such is what often happens when one gets into that level of the art world:  aesthetic value and economic value become one.  The cultural capital of taste, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it.

The piece is ruined.  It's a shame.  There can be a lot of chatter about the ridiculousness of the contemporary arts and well, some things are ridiculous.  And self-important.  But get in there and actually try to make something; it's a long, long, long, hard and very intellectual endeavor.  It either takes a good training or a massively unique intuitive sense of how space, color and to some extent time work -- and such things do have properties; properties which can be used to say things.  Artists have the right to be iconoclastic -- as Ai himself might have been in a work (pictured in the background) called "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn" (1995).  Ai dropped a Han Dynasty urn.  They took pictures.  That stuff can get bad reactions.  In such cases, artists are taking it upon themselves to represent ironies in a global life full of them and to which they themselves contribute.

What's a shame is that money value at all enters the picture here.  In the end, the nudnik and his dropping broke a statement.  It's happened before -- also likely to artists noticeably less famous than Ai.  However, what matters is in no way, shape or form the price.  What matters is the status of a work -- yes, in part because it has run through the mill of "taste" and its "cultural capital" -- that participates somehow in public discussions and the representation of us.  That's back to ourselves (the subject to whom the object of "us" gets represented).  I think I'm the green one on the right. 

We Know

It should have been another picture (to the right).  The UN report that came out over the past day reveals horrifying stuff about North Korea -- rapes, murders, forced suicides, brain washing, forced labor.  Basic habeas corpus rights are so far from what's going on in the playland of the Kims that even a good-old-fashioned-Saudi-Arabia-let's-not-allow-women-to-drive style oppression sounds humane by comparison.  Here we go again; another totalitarian state putting people to death by the thousands.  In the 1950s, the philosopher Hannah Arendt defined totalitarianism as a state which relates to its population through terror. Indeed.

  There's three points to be made about this -- serious ones, as people's lives are at stake.  Firstly, the North Korean regime will fall.  Regimes, all states, empires, civilizations or any manner of political structure eventually takes its tumble.  Some of the world's less friendly regimes have had relatively short lives -- the Greek colonels regime of the late '60s and early '70, the twenty years or so of military dictatorship in Brazil from the '60s to the '80s and the Franco years in Spain (1939-1975, as brutal as they were) at least found some variety of end point.  Others last longer.  Make no mistake; when the Russian Revolution came, for the vast majority of the people -- the peasants specifically -- three hundred years of the Romanovs had been no liberating experience.  The Qing Dynasty, China's last imperial dynasty, was also rotten to the core; it tortured, murdered and weaseled its way forward over a good few hundred years (though at the end, the West was exerting serious pressure upon it).  Theoretically, there could come an invasion of North Korea (it seems to have been quite possible in Iraq [twice], Libya [well, bombing] and Afghanistan).  Such action is unlikely in North Korea anytime soon; China wouldn't have it, it would be bloody and possibly nuclear.  There might come an Eastern Bloc-like 1989-like uprising -- though that's also unlikely as the flow of ideas is radically more controlled in North Korea than it was in Eastern Europe (it's not even close).  There might come a much darker version of such a revolt -- like what happened against Ceausescu in Romania times three, or maybe three hundred.  The extra factors come because such a revolt would be the result of hunger -- not liberal ideas and an interest in following other revolutionary dominoes.  When real hunger sets in, danger can follow (and there have been significant famines).  One way or the other, however, we can be guaranteed the end will come.

Point two is that America and the West -- well, America really -- need to acknowledge their responsibility in all this.  The U.S. backed Syngman Rhee at the end of the 1940s and his old-fashioned authoritarian crackdown on left-wing political dissent contributed to the start of the Korean War.  No one was holding free elections on the Korea peninsula before 1950; two regimes faced one another in a cauldron of Cold War pressure.  By the end of the war, North was beat back into a corner and it barred itself in. There's never really been any move towards entente.  There's been a couple of pragmatic interventions like Madeleine Albright's in 2009.  However, those have been about specific issues (nuclear weapons) rather than attempts to hold out a hand of general  acceptance such that North Korea might come into the international community rather than shun it (that's always been posed as "their choice").  Many of the problems the UNHCR is now reporting on have been known for a long time -- North Korea's gulags have hardly been a secret.  The gulags, for all their atrociousness, are nonetheless intended to defend something.  Were there an indication that there were nothing against which to defend, who knows what ideas and technologies might flow across a border that for sixty years has been one of the world's most difficult to permeate?

Lastly, the defeat of North Korea, when it does come -- and again, it will at some point -- will be the end of a particular variety of the socialist idea.  Now, one might say "good riddance."  One should -- we'll get to that in a minute.  However, the notion of a full and absolute rejection of anything capitalistic -- in nearly any form -- is an extreme rarity in today's world; never mind the willingness to bar oneself off from the rest of the world and rot rather than give in (and don't give me the example of Cuba; there's no Europeans drinking white russians from coconuts on North Korean beaches).  Might that latter move -- the barring off and rotting -- really be about the dictatorial mindset of a ruling clique?  Undoubtedly.  However, that the principle of absolute socialist utopia is at least brandished forward and held out as an idea to consider exists virtually nowhere else.  It was once an idea that held some cachet -- societies with no wealth inequality, universal cooperation among its members, full employment for all, the absolute guarantee of medical care, education and the removal of market-based and commercial drivel  from our minds.  It's not to say that's the society had in the Democratic People's Republic.  It is to say it's at least the principle held forward, though -- without any compromise.

Nonetheless, such old fashioned absolutisms have to be put aside for now.  In the words of Michael Donald Kirby, the head of the panel that issued today's findings, "we can't say we didn't know."  100% right.  The age old excuse for why states haven't acted in the face of crushing human tragedy has been thrown out the window.  The UN is challenging us to do something.  We should.  If the DPRK won't allow in UN inspectors and clean up its act (the best thing would be to get the Chinese to supervise any possible team [again, Chinese standards will be better than North Korean standards, and at least it might get done]), you have to think about the use of force, damn the consequences.  If one wants what the DPRK said it was trying to build -- and one might -- one will have to try again.  The first time didn't work. 

The Donnybrook at the End of History

Those crazy parliamentarians are at it again -- this time in Turkey.  Turkey, usually considered a stable bridge between East and West, has become something of an internal mess over the past years.  It's hard to tell precisely what it's about.  The AK party -- with Erdogan as its absolutely domineering figure (though he was actually banned from participating in Turkish politics at the time his party took power) -- has swung a fair portion of social policy to the right, though economic policy has become more laissez faire.  It's been a tough and controversial -- though in some ways popular -- blow in a country which had traditionally maintained an essentially laicistic principle; keeping state and religion separate in revolutionary democracy's grand tradition.  That separation, however, sometimes came at a gunpoint -- at which point, one wonders what is, or was, being separated from what (the army, traditionally, was the guarantor of the secular republic).

Erdogan is in the midst of a massive corruption scandal, and in a style that would make Silvio Berlusconi proud, he's pulling out all the stops to avoid having the light turned too closely on his own actions and those of his close associates.  There's been serious shifts in the cabinet and the bureaucracy and a purge of the police.  An Imam named Fethullah Gülen, who now lives in Pennsylvania, is being used as a kind of straw man in the middle of this; he wields significant religious and cultural influence in Turkey and was a former ally of Erdogan's.  Erdogan says he wants his (Erdogan's) power.  Erdogan might be right.

The fight came in relation to a bill that would place much of the governance of the country's judiciary in the government's hands.  This would blur a distinction that Turkey has by hook or by crook managed to maintain for the better part of its nearly century-long moden history (Atatürk made initial declarations of a new Turkey in 1920; by 1922 the last legal vestiges of the Ottomans were gone and by 1923 the Republic of Turkey had full international recognition).  An opposition MP called Erdogan a dictator.  Someone didn't like that.  There was yelling.  There was hitting.  The bill passed, 210-28.  Not even close.  Could be that the courts will strike it down in an effort to save their own autonomy.

It seems somehow comical when members of parliament come to fisticuffs.  Indian Business News has published a list of twenty great parliamentary brouhahas:  from Bolivia to Korea, lawmakers like to get into it.  Passions flare; manhood gets challenged -- though a couple of legislators from the fairer sex have also managed to land a couple of good haymakers here and there.  You'd love to say it was just non-democratic backwaters that descend into this kind of behavior.  It's not, though -- Turkey is an example of how that's definitely not the case -- and you can't even write the thing off to macho Mediterranean tempers; the Taiwanese legislature has decided more than once that it's Indian leg wrestling time. Taiwan isn't exactly the outer edges of the Third World.  Its GNP per capita is higher than Belgium's, Denmark's, Japan's or France's.

So what gives?  In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published his widely-read analysis of the end of the Cold War, The End of History and the Last Man.  Academics hammered it as simplistic -- and for those of us on the left (as in the "we-still-like-socialism-red" left), its argument that Marxism's time as a valid politics was up grated (it still does).  Fukuyama was right, though:  it was liberal democracy's time.  It was the time of thymos -- thymos being a word from Greek philosophy indicating "spiritedness."  It was time for all manners of self-expression, rational or not.  Fukuyama thought rationality would win out; like wagons circling around a campfire after a long journey, as he characterized it.  Whether we agreed or not, the era of open voice was upon us.

There was a lot of open voice, or free speech, prior to 1989 or 1991 or 1992, or whenever one wants to call the Cold War done.  There was even a lot of funky free speech one might not like; the revolt against the Shah in Iran in 1979 would be a good example for secularists, anyway.  As the international studies scholar Samuel Huntington presciently pointed out in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, that's the kind of free speech that scares the bejeebers out of the West -- the claim to fundamentalistic, religious (and non-Christian) sovereignty.  However, there's an evolving process today of a massive range of identities and ideologies having to negotiate new spaces with one another and finding sustenance in new trends; many more political entities since the end of the Cold War have been trading in religious ideas than any time during that bipolar conflict.  It's hardly to say that the end of the Cold War leads to parliamentary fights in Turkey.  It is to say that the whats and wherefores of national politics in many places in the contemporary world are experiencing massive torsion -- torsion related to the idea that it's not only around economics and wealth management that ideology might organize itself, but religious identity and theology too.  Turkey's AK (the abbreviation for "justice" and "development") claims no Islamicism; just "social conservatism."  However, in a country whose religious minorities (Orthodox, Catholics -- a surprising number of Jews) are in the end extremely small, "social conservatism" can only mean one thing.  There is a serious battle brewing between various stripes of Islamicism and multiple approaches to secularism and republicanism.  Those faultlines have always been present.  They're relatively out in the open at the moment, though.

So free speech manifests itself.  A society goes through the internally violent process of negotiating who is "us" and what the terms are going to be for policing participation in that group.  Someone will loose that battle.  The question is whether we want the side that wins to be a side that might not allow the same free speech for others it has been enjoying in its assertion "who" and "what" it is.  We'll have to keep our eyes open to find out the results.

(The Circumstance; sends its thanks to Ada Burçak for insightful comments on recent Turkish history that made this post possible.)

Rewind Find; or Why Grace Slick will Kick Your Ass Twice on Tuesdays

It's hard to remember, but there was a time when Jefferson Airplane was one of the bands -- legend stuff; as big as the Stones, almost as big as the Beatles (of course, no one ever was quite  that big), bigger than the Dead and as big as the Who, Cream or Hendrix.  The Airplane was right in the middle of the largest Summer(s) of Love festivals -- no one else played at Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont -- and they sold a serious amount of records.  In a way, the band survived for a long time -- it showed up in the '70s and '80s as Jefferson Starship, then just Starship, and Hot Tuna was a kind of version of the band.  But it was really four or five years we had Jefferson Airplane as Jefferson Airplane.  There was some serious rockin' in those four or five years.

It's the albums with Grace Slick that matter; they first had a different singer (Signe Toly Andersen).  What Slick did for the Band was like what Ann Wilson did (and does) for Heart; it was a low alto voice that could match the power of heavy electronics at the same time as it could serve as a contrast to some lighter, well-done acoustic stuff.  And the Airplane could play both.  The guitar solo "Embryonic Journey" from Surrealistic Pillow (one of the great rock album names ever) is one of the defining sounds of '67 in its absolutely organic, bright, we-will-liberate-ourselves-with-love feel.  The Airplane was sensitive to what it was doing, and its musicians, before it was fashionable, had the chops to pull it off.

What's most surprising -- shocking, almost -- is in going back and revisiting the four key albums, Surrealistic Pillow (1967), After Bathing at Baxter's (also 1967 [remember when groups might release more than one album in a year?]), Crown of Creation (1968) and Volunteers (1969) was how heavy the band could be.  "Somebody to Love," from Surrealistic Pillow -- a tune with a pretty heavy sound -- is one of the band's best known numbers; the über-psychedelic "White Rabbit" is probably the band's best known tune, though.  It some ways, it's atypical.  Behind the Dead -- and part of the San Francisco scene sound at the time -- was a jug band.  A small touch of that comes into the Airplane.  A much smaller touch than with the Dead, though.  The Airplane had a pretty direct and pretty heavy guitar sound -- so heavy, at times, that while you'd never attribute the roots of metal anywhere than but to Black Sabbath, some surprisingly hard hitting came through the fretwork of Jorma Kaukonen and Paul Kantner, the bass playing of Jack Kasady and the drumming of Spencer Dryden.  They made that jangly '60s sound.  But they also hit you with a surprisingly thick bottom; "Volunteers," from the album by that name, hits you hard all the way through.  There was gunshot behind their flower power.

Take some time with the Jefferson Airplane back catalogue and you'll rediscover the power of songs you might know, and the surprising, thorough excellence of lesser remembered cuts like "Eskimo Blue Day" from Volunteers (where the Airplane comes close to discovering heavy metal flute).  For four or five years, they were a hell of group -- a solid cut above some others, like the Doors who, for some reason, seem to have been better remembered, and undoubtedly on par with anything of the Stones', who now enjoy preeminence with the Beatles and Zeppelin as a kind of rock holy trinity.  Grace Slick might have arm wrestled Robert Plant.  She might just have won.

We're Never Going Back

Yesterday, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (my favorite of the district courts) declared the state's ban on same sex marriage unconstitutional.  It is part of a tidal wave of transformation in relation to same sex marriage in the U.S. over roughly the past decade (since roughly 2003, when Massachusetts became the first state to legalize the practice).  As of 2009, anywhere you go in New England, you can same-sex marriage.  The great states of Illinois and Minnesota?  Same sex marriage.  Renting a car to go to New Mexico -- or Washington, or Iowa?  No problem; go for it -- same sex marriage.  Kansas, Missouri and Montana are tough.  But you know what?  Here's the value that comes with legal equality and the ability to petition your government:  lawsuits are pending in all three states concerning gay marriage.  Rumor has it that Barak Obama didn't go to the opening of the Winter Olympics in Russia in part because of the country's anti-gay politics.  In these posts, I usually save the editorial remark for the end.  I'll do it now:  that was the right thing to do, Barak.

It's interesting; in Europe, same-sex partnership, a bit different than marriage, has been tolerated for some time in most of progressive, northwestern Europe (not everywhere, but most places).  Legal recognition of registered partnership in many of those states has also been in place for some time; again, not exactly marriage, but some level of institutionalization.  The move for actual marriage, however, came at roughly the same time as in the U.S.:  Denmark, France, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Belgium and the U.K. all came to allow it over the past ten years or so.   Gay marriage has had some spread to Latin America.  On your way to Uruguay?  Argentina?  Pack a bag and consider it.  If you're gay and you want to, you can tie the knot while you're down there.

In combination with a recent rash -- well, by pro sports standards, anyway -- of professional athletes coming out, or athletes about to join the professional ranks (hello Jason Collins and Michael Sam -- though you should call Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova and thank them for blazing a trail for you), some strange combination of America and the globe are on a path that will be very tough to shut down.  For many parts of the globe, there's no turning back; gays are attaining the civil (and most importantly, equal) rights they should have always had.  The road will be spectacularly long in other places.  That's whether it's Poland, where the country's intense Catholicism will present decades of barriers, or Iran, so spectacularly wound up in annoying the international community that the country to this day is still not a signatory (along with the Sudan and Somalia [the latter perhaps getting a pass for not having had a functioning government for two decades]) on rights treaties as basic (for example) as the Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979) -- not at all related to gay issues, but an example of issues in basic (ridiculously basic) social progress.  Generally, historians hesitate to talk about Zeitgeists; they're too general, and it's hard to tell what they say.  However, as far as Zeitgeists go, it's a good one in the twenty-first century for gay marriage.  Like civil rights and global anti-colonialism from an earlier time, the signs are there for global sea changes that, with time, will be tough -- maybe impossible -- to undo. 

Postmodern Torsion

The news from The New York Times today is that a series of coordinated prison breaks -- not in Syria, but Iraq -- has released hundreds of militants to enter the fray in Syria's roughly three year old civil war.  Apparently, the breaks have been coordinated by the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant, one of the more ideological (and al-Qaeda affiliated) groups in the conflict.  Yes, you heard right.  Prison breaks.  In Iraq.  To free militants to fight in Syria.

In some sense it is of course worth noting that the cross-border employ of new bodies to enter civil conflict is hardly new.  It's perhaps the nature of mercenary work, especially when things turn brutal.  Mercenaries from all over Africa were in Muammar Gaddafi's employ during the Libyan civil war. Bashar Al-Assad is using foreign mercenaries and troops on his side in the current Syrian conflict.  Indeed, turning the clock back a couple of centuries, for those who remember their American history, Hessian soldiers were among the most feared troops faced by the American colonists in their rebellion against the British.  Still, though, it's deflating news.  The rough estimates by most media put the death toll in the conflict around 100,000.  The number of refugees has swelled to well over 2,000,000. An absolute phalanx of actors has been involved in the Geneva II peace talks in their various rounds; the Pope sent an envoy from Vatican City to sit next to representatives from India and Indonesia -- all of whom, apparently, have an interest in events unfolding in Syria.  Of course, that's next to the usual EU-Arab League-U.S.-Russia phalanx that seems to show up everywhere.  It's been an intense, virtual international gang-up on peace.

Everyone knows the Syrian conflict needs to stop.  It's one of the great ironies that in today's day and age, we can't seem to get these things to stop (Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and Somalia are also examples).  There's nothing flip meant in the statement; roughly since Vietnam, modern warfare has been taking place very much in front of the camera's eye, there for all to see -- at least when we want cameras there (and in Syria, it seems we do).  Ours is a world of few secrets -- and as many of the world's powerful governments have gotten to know over the past years, even secrets are hard to keep these days.  We know the moral of the story.  For some reason, though, it seems hard for us to make our morals a reality.

It is false to say that there was ever a time when the lines of either global or civil conflict were neat, all the ideological ends tied and all social dynamics accounted for; a "classic" proletariat never squared off against a "classic" bourgeoisie in either nineteenth or early twentieth century Europe -- interests were much more complex than that -- the Cold War created some strange bedfellows and the Stern Gang, the Jewish militant group responsible for terrorist attacks against the British in attempts to evict the Empire from the then-Palestine Mandate, entertained an alliance with Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy in the interest of achieving just that goal.  Somehow, however, this is worse.  All the actors are present in front of us.  Many of them advertise themselves on the Internet.  The protagonists hardly keep themselves in the dark.  And still we can't get hold of rhyme or reason, figure out what anyone wants or get positions and goals stabilized enough such that real negotiation might begin.  Real negotiation, of course, begins when one knows what people have in mind.  That's so they can begin the process of giving it up, at least in part.

When the forces of modernization have been so thorough that significant sectors of the world come to experience a malaise that leads to fundamentalism, the power of democracy and the expectation of free speech is so prevalent we expect that it can take any form -- parties with questionable free speech credentials in Egypt, for example, claiming they have been duly elected (which they were) only to be overthrown by a clearly anti-free speech army -- and we are unclear about  the terms and purposes of intervention and the meaning of free societies, it becomes very easy for a conflict to spread in multiple directions:  geographically, ideologically and in terms of the spectacle of a range of bizarre actions, like prison breaks, that can lead to the deaths of hundreds more on top of the thousands we hardly dare to count. In the absence of ideological clarity, and a clear statement of purpose of what all actors want -- not only those on the ground, but those superpowers attempting to bring them to the negotiating table -- it will be difficult to avoid the irony and painful ludicrosity of a group of men sitting in lord-knows-who's living room and communicating over any of the million possible mobile networks, saying "let's go break guys out of prison over there (over there!) to get our fighting done over here."  And then actually doing it.  Prison.  Tomorrow, someone who shouldn't is going to pay the price for this massive set of ironies.  I'm not sure who.  But we know someone will.  

18% There (Boston, Life, Love & Hope)

One of the remarkable things about Boston's first two albums -- two of the best-selling debut albums in rock history -- was how unfull of bad songs they were.  Rock is a tough genre; wildly fun, but so extremely hard to find albums where every cut is a winner.  Beethoven most rockers aren't.  Thank God; it's not what we're looking for anyway.

Luckily, today's world of streaming music and mp3s means being able to get straight to the lean meat, or at least quickly identify and cut away the fat.  As one of the all time great Rush fans, for example, that's a huge bonus.  A few of those albums from the early '90s?  Eek.  Let's find the one or two good songs and move on.

On Life, Love & Hope -- the sixth Boston studio album -- you can take the first two cuts (18% of the album) and go home.  The eponymous debut album, Don't Look Back or Third Stage this is not.  Now, the first two cuts, "Heaven on Earth" and "Didn't Mean to Fall in Love," are true Boston songs; they're a little electronic sounding to have fit in on the slightly looser first two albums, but they would have fit in perfectly on Third Stage -- and Third Stage was solid work.  It goes downhill from there, though -- and anytime Tom Scholz, who essentially is Boston at this point -- gets involved with sampling or electronica, things are bound to get ugly.  And it does.  Per any Boston album, the mix is amazing:  rounded, textured, deep, bassy.  But the rock band that sounded like Bo Derek looked is gone.  You gotta remember, with Bo it wasn't just about the photograph; it was also about a natural girl who could look right at you and make you say "oh my."  Apparently, she's taken up residency in the Caymans for tax purposes.  (2/10)

The Millionaire Who Played the Game Right

The announcement went out, received almost instantaneously in today's hyper-networked world, that Derek Jeter would retire from baseball at the end of this year.  19 years to now, if you include the handful of games Jeter played for the Yankees in '95; it'll be 20 when he's done.  All of them at shortstop.  For those who know baseball, you know shortstop is the key to the whole deal.  In baseball, you have to be strong up the middle.  If you've been good enough to start nearly everyday at shortstop for 19 years on a consistent championship contender, you've been strong up the middle.  For a long time.

I've always felt a special kinship with Jeter.  As kids, most of us imagine ballplayers -- guys in any sport, really -- as men; "older guys" having reached some sort of maturity we squeedunks hadn't.  At some point in your 20s, however, you realize you're  the same age as the guys on the tube.  Then, come your mid-30s, no matter what sport it is, you realize you're older than many of the guys on TV.  Then they begin to retire.  Then you realize that, in point of fact, you're not young anymore.

Jeter was always around the same age as I; I turned forty in the autumn, he'll do that this summer.  However, Jeter was always there; since my early twenties, when I rediscovered my love for the game after taking a few years off to act disaffected and pretend I had a future in jazz (or that I wanted one), Jeter was there -- the centerpiece of a team that for a decade or so gave me a taste of what it must have been like for my dad's generation:  a time when the Yankees always won and the "NY" and pinstripes were a kind of national institution; the army or Ford Motors of sports.  It was exciting to follow.  As a boy I read a lot of baseball history -- a lot of Donald Honig.  The Yankees, led by Jeter, seemed to be like that history.  It was true excellence; the question was not whether the team and its players would be good, but how good.  The question was how that excellence would be expressed.

In all honesty, Jeter wasn't my kind of player.  As young guy, I liked Reggie Jackson and Dave Kingman -- men's men who struck out a lot, spun themselves into the ground while doing so and hit the ball a country mile when they found it.  Jeter always seemed skinny to me.  He hit 19 home runs for the '98 team -- perhaps the greatest team in the history of baseball; 24 for the '99 team (also a great team, but inevitable losers of a few more games than the off-the-charts total of 114 in '98).  I hoped Jeter would do more of that.  He didn't.  He hit a hell of a lot of singles to right field.  He didn't pull the ball much.  Late into his '30s he was still skinny (I wasn't so much anymore).  At forty, I asked myself how in the world he keeps himself in that kind of shape.

However, it grows, or at least grew, on you (at least it did me), what Jeter did.  Jeter didn't just hit singles to right field; he hit hundreds of them -- maybe thousands -- to right field.  Jeter gained a reputation as a near indestructible clutch player -- which he was in a way, but largely by simply maintaining the consistently high level of play he had in regular situations and games that didn't count too much (Jeter hit .312 in the regular season, .308 in the postseason; if you're a baseball fan, you know it's a wash).  Jeter was a good fielder, but not great; he never moved left well.  Jeter struck out more than you'd think.  But Jeter had the moments -- not just moments, but the moments -- we dream about; performances in situations so intense that most players would feel immortalized if they had one Jeter moment.  But Jeter's moments being Jeter's moments, he had a basketful of them.  The Jeffrey Maier homerun in '96.  The I-ran-all-the-way-across-the-diamond-to-catch-a-ball-no-one-else-should-have-in-any-way-shape-or-form-least-of-all-I-then-I'll-freak-all-of-you-out-by-making-an-insane-awkward-flip-to-get-a-runner-no-one-thought-could-be-got play ("The Flip") against Oakland in '01.  The walk-off homerun against Arizona in game 4 of the '01 World Series -- that sent New Yorkers drained from the world of post-9/11 into pandemonium.  The headfirst dive into the stands on the third base side of the old Yankee Stadium in '04.  The guy hit a homerun -- a homerun -- for his 3000th hit, for Christmas' sake. As a kid, you couldn't make this stuff up.  Maybe one moment.  Not a whole bag full, though.  And at the end, it was especially satisfying because you knew it was no fluke.  Jeter's numbers were always good.  They weren't the videogame numbers of Barry Bonds or other big bashers of the era.  But they were  good.  All the time.  For a long time.

And there another point needs to be made.  Jeter didn't take drugs.  He stayed off the juice.  So many other prime players of the era did not.  They can say they did.  But they didn't.  The bodies, and body changes, were too massive for it to be otherwise.  Jeter, though, did what you were supposed to, and only that.  Keep your head down and put a level swing on the ball.  Solid contact, not more.  Field the ball in front of you; two hands.  Square your shoulders before you throw.  Hustle on every play.  Show some modesty.

Make no mistake.  Jeter earned a ton of money for what he did -- a man playing a boy's sport.  The salaries in professional sports are criminal.  It can't be ok to make 15-20 million dollars a year to play a sport many of us wanted to play when we were kids, and would have done so for free.  To even make a million is too much.  Teachers should get a million.  Sanitation workers should get a million.  Librarians should get a million.  Derek Jeter participated in and profited from a world that may well be morally wrong.  As "dignified" as he has behaved by sports standards -- and he has -- it's hard to tell if he's been aware of that fact.  The size of the compound Jeter lives in in Florida indicates maybe not.

Sometimes, though, whether it's with bands we like, the privileges middle class life affords us or the sports we watch, we have to trade in our higher ethos for the entertainment and escape sports, music and the arts provide. We deserve that sometimes.  With Jeter, if we just let baseball be baseball for a minute -- and we should, because it's still, along with jazz and saving Europe from itself in a couple of world wars, one of America's great contributions to the world -- we encounter what might have been the best baseball player of a generation.  That's because he played the game right.  Jeter played baseball in the way you want to teach your kids.  He did it on the premier franchise in perhaps the world's premier city under enormous pressure.  He did it everyday for 19 -- what will be 20 -- years; from Bush, Sr. to the last years of Obama.  Jeter was the Mickey Mantle of his generation.  It seems he's retiring.  And as he does, the last guy playing where I can say, "well, if I had the skills, I could still be playing" retires too.  Give 'em hell for us 40-year olds, DJ.  We've got one more year before we have to officially say we're not kids anymore.