by Christopher Bacas

In 1980, a college music student, I took a job at a Bar-B-Que joint. It was a mile walk from my place. I went in once or twice a week for a closing shift. A full size covered wagon sat on a pedestal in the parking lot. It looked shabby, but functional. I watched it survive North Texas weather over the two years I worked there. The restaurant had two sides, a burger counter and cafeteria-style BBQ. I worked with the pit crew; cutting and trimming brisket, ribs and chicken and serving our BBQ customers. Jim Lake managed the location for Mr Henry Lasalle, the millionaire owner. With his thick mustache, high cheekbones and cleft chin, Jim looked like a composite of Dudley-do-Right and Snively Whiplash. He wore cowboy boots and immaculate denim. I never saw him take off his ten-gallon hat. The day I showed up for training, he was busy out back in the BBQ pit. A guy named Mike trained me. He had an easy way with clientele:

"Whut kin ah git fer ye?"

"Yessir. Slice beef. Ye want plate er sammich?

" Po' Boy er regler?

"Ye want sauce on that?"

"I kin give ye some in one o these sauce deals."

"Yep. Now, the rib sauce IS sweeter. Yessir"

The step up to the cutting board passed through a pair of louvered saloon doors. They swung tightly on noisy springs. Mike showed me how to remove the top of the brisket with a smooth sideway cut. That left a juicy, stringy slab ready for against-the-grain slicing and a fatty top pushed aside on the white plastic block. Mike swept scraps into a removable steel drawer recessed under the block. The knife had to be sharp. Mike showed me how to sharpen it with a butcher steel. He told me Mr Lasalle had come behind the counter a few weeks before and grabbed a knife away from an employee and "chewed their ass rill good"

"Ya'll are RUININ' these knives!" He shouted.

Mike mentioned the owner was drunk, a description I'd hear often.

The BBQ pit was a shed attached to the building. A zigzag black pipe vented smoke. The meat rotated through the heat on a set of swinging ledges propelled by a variable-speed motor. Manager-on-duty had to monitor the pit temperature and cooking cycles. In Texas summer, the area around the pit, buffeted by wood smoke, was this heathen's idea of Hell on earth.

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On Women’s Liberation

After Iqbal

Is a necklace of emeralds more liberating?

Translated, from the original Urdu, by Rafiq Kathwari: @brownpundit / www.rafiqkathwari.com

by Maniza Naqvi

Why does this President lie in the White House? Because they all did. And because they all will. But this one lies because the last few didn't do it with the finesse that has normally been typical of the White House. The last few didn't do it with the sophistication of those before them. The last few were unvarnished, bumbling liars, blatant, impertinent, cloying, open, transparent liars. So they lied and each and every one of them took us to war, like every one of them, before them had done. And even though the lies were called out and everyone knew they lied, yet these men continued to lie and because of their lies millions of people died, uncounted, unaccounted for, as if they never mattered, as if they never existed. As if they simply were vaporized.

Now we have the newest liar. So what is the problem? And those who claim to call him out, claim they have caught him out, they are exactly those who have known the lies all along, the lies of all the others, and have tolerated them. Till now. Why? Because this liar's lies, bite into theirs. These catchers of lies, they lie too, oh yes they do, clear as day those lies lie in their quaint expressions claiming integrity with a few hokey hee-haws of lordy, lordy, lordy me. Liars. I wish there were tapes. How I wish I could tape all their mouths shut. Perhaps then the wars and its machinery of opiates, micro breweries, cannabis,TV and weapons would end.

by Elise Hempel

Sometime back in the late '80s or early '90s, at an African restaurant somewhere in Chicago, there it was again, in whatever dish I'd ordered – that taste, just a hint of it (what was it?), in this bite and now in that one, that fresh, intriguing taste I'd tasted before in both Indian and Mexican food. I had to find out what it was, knowing that it wasn't the obvious fish or chicken or lamb, or the okra or carrot or eggplant. No Google yet, no smartphone then (or now, I must admit) to do a quick internet search, I may have asked the waiter what it was in my dish that was so … fantastic. Or I may have asked my friend Liz, my dining partner that night, a real Chicagoan who lived in the city proper (I was only from the northwest suburbs) and was slightly more savvy about international cuisine, frequenting the ethnic restaurants in her northside neighborhood. Whatever the case, Liz was suddenly my culinary opposite: She hated that taste. And she didn't just hate it; she hated it with eye-squinting, nose-scrunching disgust.

I'm remembering that particular night many years ago as I stand here chopping cilantro for the pico de gallo that will top our pulled-chicken tacos tonight, as I breathe it in – that fresh, indefinable green. Cilantro. Can there really be a time when I didn't know what cilantro was? When I was a part-time cilantro-sleuth, tracking its scent in every restaurant, trying to make connections between this dish and that, always whispering to myself, There it is again, trying to match a taste to a name, a thing I could see?

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by Richard King

It's the first week of winter here in Australia. Time to move the herbs to a sunnier spot; to fetch the heater up from the shed; to throw an extra blanket on the bed … And, of course, to dig out the jackets and jumpers from the walk-in robe, and stow the colourful summer gear: the sarongs, the short-sleeved shirts, the shorts, the beachwear, the Political Lace …

Sorry? You've not heard of Political Lace? Oh but it's the latest thing, and very, very beautiful! It's what's known in the fashion world as "a wearable" – part art, part garment, part technology. And it's lace, you see, but political. Hence the name: "Political Lace".

But perhaps I'm not explaining this well. I'll let the cool-hunters at PSFK expand:

A wearable can do more than just catch your eye – it can start an important conversation.

Wearables continue to make their way into conversations about innovative fashion. Just recently, they made appearances at both New York Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week. But beyond their aesthetic appeal, wearables can serve as a way to discuss important issues. Curator, artist and creative technologist Melissa Coleman wanted to find "the most minimal way to represent data" related to women's rights.

Using data from a UNICEF report, Coleman found that the number of "girls dying in childbirth every year due to preventable circumstances" meant one woman was dying every 7.5 minutes. The result: Political Lace, a fashion piece that lights up every 7.5 minutes to symbolize another death.

Coleman explained more about the thought process behind the piece in an email:

"I thought: if you only have one LED, what can you say? I realized the most powerful thing you could do with it is count lives, which was perfect for representing a political cause. I am passionate about women's rights, so the piece became about the sad intersection of poverty, youth and education that results in teenagers dying in childbirth all around the world."

Political Lace starts a discussion through its visual nature – the wearer would stand out in virtually any situation or location with the piece. When strangers ask about the nature of the piece, it creates a way for the wearer to discuss an ethical and political issue in an unexpected way.

So, there you go. Want to look like a million bucks and "start an important conversation" about women and girls who die in childbirth? Then treat yourself to some Political Lace, "a fashion piece that lights up every 7.5 minutes to symbolize another death". Classy!

No, I didn't make this up. And yes, it is self-satirising – such that it puts itself beyond real controversy. (It's highly unlikely we'll ever see anyone actually wearing this ludicrous garment, save for the agonised adolescent on PSFK's "creative intelligence platform".) But as with Kendall Jenner and that Pepsi commercial, I find myself asking how on earth it was that this thing came to exist at all. How is it that Political Lace found its way into a designer's head, let alone into an uncritical article in The Guardian? From what combination of cultural brassicas did such a brainfart emerge? And what political atmospherics permitted it to linger long enough to be noticed?

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by Carl Pierer

Arthur Miller's famous dissection of the American Dream in his Death of a Salesman still stands as a hallmark of American literature that has not lost any of its appeal. Its striking and damning socio-politico commentary continues to be of relevance. There is, however, a second, more intimate and personal drama that takes place between the two main characters, Willy and Linda Loman. The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, well-known for his calm and minimalist depiction of domestic drama in such films as A Separation and The Past, transposes the play to an Iranian setting and thereby allows for a new perspective on Miller's play. Farhadi's unexcited narrative style gives much room to the interior life of his characters, creating a suspense that entirely draws from the psychological development of the protagonists. With his new film The Salesman, Farhadi continues to explore the subtle mechanics of a fractured relationship.

The film opens with for Farhadi unusually blunt symbolism: At night, Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) and Emad (Shahab Hosseini) have to rush to evacuate their Teheran apartment, for an immediate collapse of the building is feared. In this opening scene already, the dynamic of the couple's relationship is manifest. Emad is shown as caring and sympathetic, carrying their bedridden neighbour to safety and making sure that everyone gets out of the building all right. Rana, in the meantime, is not shown to participate actively in the hubbub.

Although the building eventually does not crumble, it is clear that the main couple's home has become unsafe to live in, the cracks in the wall standing for the cracks in their relationship. Emad and Rana are actors, and their group is rehearsing Miller's Death of a Salesman. When another actor offers to let them stay at one of his apartments, the couple is only too glad to accept. But the new place does not provide the fresh start they were hoping for. Something already seems to be odd when the previous tenant, despite multiple calls from the landlord, refuses to pick up her remaining boxes. Nonetheless, Emad and Rana make an effort to make their new home. Soon, however, the events take a turn for the darker. One evening, Rana, home alone, buzzes open the door unsuspectingly thinking it is Emad.

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By Grace Boey

Imagine the following scenario. Bob doesn’t have any opinion on whether abortions are okay. Although he could think through the issue for himself, Bob takes another route: he asks his friend Sally what she thinks. Because Bob trusts Sally, he doesn’t hesitate to believe her when she says that abortions are fine. From then on, Bob doesn’t give the question any more thought, and goes about acting as if what Sally says is true.

What, if anything, is weird about Bob? There might not be much of a problem if Bob already has some strong moral views about the permissibility of ending life more generally, and trusts that Sally—who happens to be an expert obstetrician— knows some intricate scientific facts about abortions and foetal development that he isn’t in a position to know or understand. But what if, instead, Bob knows all the scientific information there is to know about abortions, lacks any moral views on the matter, and proceeds to outsource his moral beliefs to Sally? Even more provocatively: what if this scenario is set far in the future, and Bob uses the widely-available and completely reliable ‘Google Morals’ app to look up whether abortions are morally permissible?

There is something off-putting about Bob in the last two scenarios, that isn’t in the first. This has been framed as the ‘puzzle of pure moral deference’ in academic philosophical discussions. The puzzle, in short, concerns the asymmetry in our willingness to defer to others about empirical matters on the one hand, and purely moral matters on the other. Most of us would have no problems with Bob believing what Sally says about the science behind abortions. But the idea of him outsourcing his ethical beliefs to someone else, and the notion of anything like ‘Google Morals’, makes us balk.

Contemporary philosophers have offered solutions to two parts of this puzzle. First, what makes us balk at the prospects of practicing pure moral deference to others? And second, even if something is amiss about the practice, is it still alright for us to do it? In other words, should we be hopeful or doubtful about outsourcing our moral beliefs to others?

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by Paul North

How strange we are! We talk about our friends. We whisper: look, she's doing it again. She acts like that because her mother treated her in such and such a way. And: look at him. He always does this sort of thing. He finally got diagnosed but clearly they have to increase his dosage. Look at us: we're evolutionarily selected to hate our enemies, to choose mates with even finger lengths, to vote republican. We love to talk about psychology, the predilections, ticks, repetitions, drives, the mechanisms that make us do what we do. Along the same lines, we fetishize abnormal psychology and tell ourselves we're well within normal, and we know we are because we watch Dexter and Criminal Minds.

Some of what our friends do we put down to psychology, but TV serial killers are totally psychologized beings. The relationship of psychology to fateful thinking can be seen most clearly in them. What serial killers do is so extreme it can only be explained by reference to a tight internal network of causes controlling their being and activities. Morality doesn't affect them; they have no second thoughts before and no regrets after. All their acts are determined by the internal network, and it's up to the detective—an amateur psychologist, sometimes a professional—to unravel it. Serial killers are totally psychologized. Nothing they do is free. Each gesture can be traced to something in their childhood, some event that caused a twist in their mind, an imbalance in their essence, an association of false ideas, though these ideas are often deeply imaginative. And yet, you would never ask what the bloody act means to a serial killer. You never wonder whether they made a conscious decision to skin their victims; instead, you ask about the pathology that caused the act. Serial killers—on TV and in the movies—are one of the few creatures around whose actions can all be ascribed a cause. The serial killer is the body of fate, and psychology is its mind, its criminal mind.

Cassius laments: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves…" We can't pinpoint exactly when fate became fault, when destiny moved out of the stars and into the psyche, but in 1599 in Julius Caesar Shakespeare noted that it had already happened. How do you predict behavior, understand the world, tell a good person from a bad person when fate is not in the stars but within you? Not Cassius, but a much later literary character tells us: "You try to reconstruct his thinking. You try to find patterns." You find patterns, not in the stars, but in the head. So says Will Graham, the "forensic specialist" in the first Hannibal Lecter novel by Thomas Harris, Red Dragon. Bloodstains darken the walls and the floor. Those traces of the crime are easy to see. The stains that blot out reason in the killer's mind are hidden and have to be uncovered painstakingly and the task is not without risk.

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by Michael Liss

We all have our "desert island" videos. Send me with a couple of John Ford Westerns, perhaps Fort Apache and My Darling Clementine. Download to my notebook the first Godfather and the first Star Wars, and add something serious like The Sorrow and the Pity, Z, or the original Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Make me laugh with The Philadelphia Story or Young Frankenstein or The Producers. Do that, and I can play quietly by myself for a while without disturbing the adults.

Yet, I belong to a secret order, The Society of Hopscotch Fanatics, and would insist on having that movie in my go bag. It's got everything: The CIA, FBI, MI-6, the Russians. Chases in trucks, cars, and airplanes. Gadgets. Appealing women with foreign accents. Exotic disguises. Even some gun-play. And music—fantastic music. It's the kind of film you could watch 20 times (or more, but who's counting?) and you would still be finding things to make you smile.

The storyline is fairly simple. A CIA field agent (Miles Kendig), who, admittedly, is a bit of an antique, is pushed into a desk job by his boss, the quintessentially boorish (and short) Meyerson. Kendig doesn't want to be benched. He shreds his file (literally, as there are apparently no electronic copies in the late 1970's) and walks out. He decides to write a book, Hopscotch, documenting some of the Agency's less glorious moments (and featuring Meyerson) and begins sending juicy chapters to interested, and sometimes horrified, readers. Kendig goes off in search of a publisher and to reunite with Isobel, his old girlfriend. Meyerson goes off (with murderous intent) in search of Kendig, dragging Kendig's protégé, Joe Cutter, and a couple of hapless CIA guys, along for the ride. We have stops in Savannah, London, Bermuda and Salzburg, plus various border-crossings and other points East and West, and do some serious damage to reputations, houses, and ears.

The cast is terrific. Walter Matthau is Kendig, and while he may seem anything but the suave international spy, he's far smarter than anyone chasing him. Beneath that Oscar Madison exterior is someone quite creative with electronic and mechanical equipment, firecrackers, and paperclips.

Glenda Jackson plays Isobel, now retired from the Agency to "marry some old Nazi" who has since departed this mortal coil, leaving her with a very useful "Von" in her last name, an Austrian passport, and sufficient means to join forces with Kendig. This is the second movie the pair co-starred in, and the very offbeat, very adult chemistry they share is not unlike a good glass of wine…complex, but cuts grease. One could say it takes a great actress to make a sex symbol out of Matthau, but she likes the guy, for all his exasperating behavior. If Glenda Jackson likes you, you must be OK.

Rounding out the featured spies, Ned Beatty is Meyerson. He's thoroughly execrable, but doesn't turn the character into a cartoon. Sam Waterston sets intellectual women's hearts aflutter as Cutter (even Eleanor Roosevelt would have liked him), and Herbert Lom is a sly Yaskov, the KGB agent (you will love his omnipresent Boris Badanov hat, trench coat and mustache).

The film has some extraordinary assets beyond its leads.

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by Holly A. Case

The remnants of Andrei Kurkov's cactus collection

Cacti don't exactly grow on trees in Ukraine. They need a great deal of light or they become deformed. In winter the air temperature has to be maintained at ten degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit), which is neither easy nor fun to manage in an apartment. Some cacti require special microclimates with controlled humidity, and most need to be checked almost daily for moth infestation.

I learned all this from the Ukrainian novelist, Andrei Kurkov. A few months ago, a group of us was sitting around a table in the Café Eiles in Vienna when someone pointed out the collection of photographs of famous visitors to the café on an adjacent wall. The conversation turned to collecting: candy canes, baseball cards, chickens… "I had the seventh-largest cactus collection in Soviet Kiev," Andrei submitted.

Many questions spring to mind following such a statement; it's hard to know which to ask first. I opted for "How many did you have?" Hundreds. In his youth, Kurkov's favorite haunt had been the animal market, and especially the cactus section. Since breeding animals and plants was one of the few unregulated economic activities in the Soviet Union, the breeders, growers, and vendors at the market comprised an "oasis" that "did not belong to Soviet reality," he recalled. Soon he joined a local cacti-growers' club and was trading seeds and growing tips with other enthusiasts. "We lived in a small flat," he told us, "only two rooms on the fifth floor and all the windows were covered with shelves of cacti," some from the market, others grown from seed. Hollow plastic building blocks with one side sawed off served as pots, and the young Andrei learned botanical Latin in order to address his protégés by their proper names.

It was during his cactus-collecting phase that Kurkov also discovered the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Minski, and other offspring of Russian literature's "silver age." Their poems reached him through volumes smuggled into the country by his elder brother's dissident friends (one of whom later died in prison, probably from a beating). The young Andrei would sit and listen to the older boys talk about poetry and bash the Soviet government in the kitchen of his parents' flat. "They were interested in everything that was not allowed," he later told me. "I think I was both frightened and curious. Maybe more curious than frightened." He remembers the time fondly, as one of "poetry and cacti."

At the growers' club he met some of Kiev's top-ranked cactomaniacs, which included an opera singer and a professor at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, among others.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

A man cloaked in myth, what if I told you that many of the stories we tell ourselves about Galileo are simply untrue? That not only did the great scientist not drop any balls off the top of the Tower of Pisa but he didn't invent the telescope either. And not only was he never excommunicated from the Catholic church but he wasn't imprisoned in a dungeon either. Would you be surprised if I brought up the fact that he had been given permission by the Pope to write on the very topic that people think got him into trouble?

Most people now realize that few believed in a flat earth even in the Middle Ages. But, were you also aware that many of the greatest natural philosophers working in mathematics and astronomy were not only theologians but were no more proponents of the Ptolemaic system than Galileo was? Indeed, the church at the time of Galileo did not have an issue with suppositions, mathematical models or observations–and many of the greatest scientists of the church were exploring the same scientific questions as Galileo.

So, the problem was not science versus religion (that would come later). Rather, it was really an issue of theological interpretation both within the church, which was not a monolith "other" as the trope suggests; and against the backdrop of the Counter-Reformation.

I think it helps to remember that up till the time of Galileo, physicists were really mathematicians, working in mathematical models–only rarely the experimentalists we imagine today. In particular, astronomers sought to describe phenomena and make predictions. They did not engage in discussions about causes or the nature of things as that was the work of theologians. Instead, they created useful astronomical (and astrological) charts and predictions. In the history of science there is much talk about "saving the phenomena" in order to make as accurate predictions as possible (see my post here on how we are seeing this again today with regard to quantum mechanics). And guess what? Before the invention of the telescope, the Copernican understanding did not make much better predictions than the Ptolemaic system. If you think about it, until Kepler's Law of Ellipses were accepted, the Copernican system was the geometric mirror image of the Ptolemaic one –and therefore still required many, many tweaks to it, including epicycles.

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by Dave Maier

I haven’t commented on politics since the election, not least because I have no special expertise. But like lots of people, I spend too much time on the internet. When I fire up my iPad, it gives me several headlines. The Washington Post sends me a daily email with dozens of links. And I have a few blogs and other sites I check every day. All that stuff gets me thinking; so I find myself, as have many here over the past few months, with some opinions to share.

I’ve also been reading a book called What We Do Now: Standing Up For Your Values in Trump’s America (Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians, eds.). Most of the many short selections in this volume seem to have been written (or delivered: some are speeches) in the immediate wake of November’s existential shock to the lefty system, so they have titles like “Thoughts for the Horrified” (Paul Krugman), “Welcome to the Resistance!” (Gloria Steinem), and “How Our Fear Can Be Turned Into a Powerful Movement” (M. Dove Kent, executive director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice). One editor’s introduction sets the tone with decidedly purple prose:

Somehow, the United States has always averted a takeover from the far right. It was something that made our country great. … Americans have always, ultimately, resisted the call to calamity by listening, instead, to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

It was such a long spell—nearly a century—that we were all perhaps too secure in the idea that “it can’t happen here.”

But now it has. It has happened here.

And so on. Again, I can forgive this sort of heavy breathing coming in November (the book itself was first published in January). But as the months drag on, it seems to me to be getting a bit stale. I should say that not all of the book maintains this apocalyptic tone, and many of the suggestions for action are perfectly sensible (e.g. “recognize we all have a role to play”). Others, not so much (“boycott all Trump products”). In any case, I’d say it’s time for a reset.

So since lists of things to do seem to be a thing, here’s mine. I’m happy to report that nothing here is particularly original and that even many of the writers at the New York Times are saying some of these same things (never thought I’d nod in agreement while reading a Ross Douthat column!), but I think they bear repeating. They are directed mostly at Democrats, but sometimes more narrowly at lefties or more broadly at anyone who does not own a cap that says “MAGA” on it.

1. Chill.

No, it hasn’t “happened here.” If the past five months have shown anything, it’s that President Trump (a phrase it might help to start using) is much more like a typical Republican (cut taxes on rich people domestically, macho bluster abroad) than a fascist or any other ideologue. Bannon’s not the president, Trump is; and Trump clearly cares a lot more about Trump than he does, well, anything else, let alone The Cause. (“La cause, c’est moi.”)

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by Ahmed Humayun

More than 70 years after its demise, the monstrous dictatorship of Adolf Hitler remains a fascinating case study of evil. I have often wondered: Did Hitler have the support of ordinary Germans? If so, how did he gain this support? There is no single or easy answer to these types of questions, but to my mind, the single most incisive guide to Hitler’s regime is "The Meaning of Hitler" (1978) by Sebastian Haffner.

Haffner grew up in Germany but fled to England with his Jewish fiancé in 1938. Originally trained as a lawyer, he became an influential journalist, political analyst, and author. During World War II, Haffner helped the West understand Nazi Germany. In "The Meaning of Hitler", Haffner suggests that most Germans supported Hitler at the height of his popularity, and that Hitler’s achievements helped win much of this support.

Of course, Hitler used force to gain and hold power. Since the 1920s, Nazi paramilitary forces had intimidated and assassinated opponents. After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the creation of the Gestapo further solidified Nazi control over German society. Hitler elevated the strategic use of terror to an art form. Haffner writes that Hitler and his henchmen would issue unhinged threats, then follow up with terrorist actions that fell short of the fearful expectations created by those threats, and finally, allow some normalcy to return while “keeping a little background terror”. This approach intimidated the general public without generating extreme opposition to Nazi rule.

Recent scholarship tends to confirm that while Nazi terror was immense, it was selective. Eric Johnson argues in "Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and ordinary Germans" (2000) that, in general, Nazi terror focused on political opponents of the regime and members of persecuted and stigmatized groups. If you belonged to these categories, you were systematically killed, tortured, and discriminated against; otherwise, you could probably stay out of the crosshairs of the Gestapo. Nazi repression didn’t necessarily impose a significant cost on the day-to-day lives of many Germans.

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May 29, 2017

Dear Babuly,

Here in America, it is Memorial Day— a day for the honored dead. (Different from Veterans' Day, observed in November, which acknowledges all who have served in the military). Memorial Day is dedicated to the remembrance of those who never came back, who lost their lives in armed conflict. Solemnity and reverence describe its mood. I am glad we have this day. But can a single day suffice? I worry that it signals a poverty of remembrance.

Lately, it feels like more and more remembrance is needed. The scourge of amnesia seems to have fallen upon us. Or, perhaps, we as a race are becoming incrementally more savage. Just this past week, so much blood spilled, I was hesitant to open the newspaper. Afraid to have the breath sucked out of me again. Even before I tell you of these events that hit me, I am conscious there are others I will not mention, that I do not know about, which by a failure of distance, or point of view, did not make the news, or my eye missed the fine print of their announcement. An unjustifiable erasure.

What would you say? I wonder.

It's these erasures, isn't it, these countless erasures that over time build up into a rage so huge it renders the wounded and desperate with a motive force? I sense it, alive and latent. A primal instinct: the will to be heard and seen by fellow humans, to scream out pain in the absence of empathy. In the darkest hour, that distorted impulse rises up and reaches out to inflict the abiding pain from within on to all those smug, laughing faces. The world is an ugly place right now. The pungency of fear sits on many tongues, poisoning the air.

On this Memorial Day, my mind conjures an image: miles of flat land marked by thousands of headstones, the graves of those felled in action. Bone-white headstones, almost translucent, against the canvas of night. The earth is rough, soil upturned beneath a turbulent sky. A vigorous wind blows across this forbidding landscape filled with the bodies of martyrs.

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by Bill Benzon

Some years ago I was reading an article in Krin Gabbard’s anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses (1995), one of a pair of anthologies arguing that “jazz has entered the mainstreams of the American academy”. The general purpose of the anthology is to help ensure that this new discipline is in harmony with the latest developments in postmodern humanities scholarship. One Steven Elworth contributed a paper examining the critical transformation of jazz into an art music: “Jazz in Crisis, 1948—1958: Ideology and Representation.”

In the course of his argument, Elworth observes: “The major paradox of all writing about culture is how to take seriously a culture not one’s own without reducing it to an ineffable Other. I do not wish to argue, of course, that one can only write of one’s own culture. In the contemporary moment of constant cultural transformation and commodification, even the definition of one’s own culture is exceedingly contradictory and problematic.”

My immediate response was “Right on! Brother!” But then I asked myself, “Just what ‘culture not one’s own’ is Elworth talking about?” Since this article is about jazz I assume that jazz culture is what he’s talking about. I further assume that Elworth is White, for I cannot imagine a Black scholar writing that way about jazz.

Cozy Cole, the drummer at the back. New York, N.Y., Sept. 1946. William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.

As we know, the jazz genealogy has strands extending variously to West Africa and Europe, has been and continues to be performed by Blacks and Whites, before audiences both Black and White – though, in the past, these have often been segmented into different venues, or different sections of the same venue – the music is conventionally considered to be Black. That convention is justified by the fact the music’s major creators have been overwhelmingly Black. Thus it follows that jazz culture is, as these conventions go, Black culture.

But, in what sense would jazz be foreign to Elworth, and so NOT his own culture? The fact that he is writing about jazz suggests that he likes it a great deal and knows more than a little about it. It is quite possible that he grew up in a house where folks listened to jazz on a regular basis. If not that, perhaps he discovered jazz while among friends or relatives and came to love it. He likely attends live performances; perhaps he is a weekend warrior, jamming with friends either privately or in public. He may well have been to weddings where a jazz band played the reception. He is comfortable with jazz; he knows something of its history and understands its conventions. It is not exotic music. That is to say, it is unlikely that Elworth discovered jazz in some foreign land where no one speaks English, nor eats and dresses American style, nor knows anything of Mozart or Patsy Cline, among many others. Jazz is a routine and familiar part of Elworth’s life.

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