v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Obama Endorsement-The Alternative

 

From The New Yorker endrosement of Obama, the Romney alternative:

There is another, larger “counterfactual” to consider—the one represented by Obama’s Republican challenger, Willard Mitt Romney. The Republican Party’s nominee is handsome, confident, and articulate. He made a fortune in business, first as a consultant, then in private equity. After running for the Senate in Massachusetts, in 1994, and failing to unseat Edward Kennedy, Romney relaunched his public career by presiding successfully over the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. (A four-hundred-million-dollar federal bailout helped.) From 2003 to 2007, he was the governor of Massachusetts and, working with a Democratic legislature, succeeded in passing an impressive health-care bill. He has been running for President full time ever since.

In the service of that ambition, Romney has embraced the values and the priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society. A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.” Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P. would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression that Romney’s remarks about the “forty-seven per cent” were a matter not of “inelegant” expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction.

Romney’s conviction is that the broad swath of citizens who do not pay federal income tax—a category that includes pensioners, soldiers, low-income workers, and those who have lost their jobs—are parasites, too far gone in sloth and dependency to be worth the breath one might spend asking for their votes. His descent to this cynical view—further evidenced by his selection of a running mate, Paul Ryan, who is the epitome of the contemporary radical Republican—has been dishearteningly smooth. He in essence renounced his greatest achievement in public life—the Massachusetts health-care law—because its national manifestation, Obamacare, is anathema to the Tea Party and to the G.O.P. in general. He has tacked to the hard right on abortion, immigration, gun laws, climate change, stem-cell research, gay rights, the Bush tax cuts, and a host of foreign-policy issues. He has signed the Grover Norquist no-tax-hike pledge and endorsed Ryan’s winner-take-all economics.

But what is most disquieting is Romney’s larger political vision. When he said that Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist democrats in Europe,” he was not only signalling Obama’s “otherness” to one kind of conservative voter; he was suggesting that Obama’s liberalism is in conflict with a uniquely American strain of individualism. The theme recurred when Romney and his allies jumped on Obama’s observation that no entrepreneur creates a business entirely alone (“You didn’t build that”). The Republicans continue to insist on the “Atlas Shrugged” fantasy of the solitary entrepreneurial genius who creates jobs and wealth with no assistance at all from government or society.

If the keynote of Obama’s Administration has been public investment—whether in infrastructure, education, or health—the keynote of Romney’s candidacy has been private equity, a realm in which efficiency and profitability are the supreme values. As a business model, private equity has had a mixed record. As a political template, it is stunted in the extreme. Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity.

Private equity has served Romney well—he is said to be worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Wealth is hardly unique in a national candidate or in a President, but, unlike Franklin Roosevelt—or Teddy Roosevelt or John Kennedy—Romney seems to be keenly loyal to the perquisites and the presumptions of his class, the privileged cadre of Americans who, like him, pay extraordinarily low tax rates, with deductions for corporate jets. They seem content with a system in which a quarter of all earnings and forty per cent of all wealth go to one per cent of the population. Romney is among those who see business success as a sure sign of moral virtue.

The rest of us will have to take his word for it. Romney, breaking with custom, has declined to release more than two years of income-tax returns—a refusal of transparency that he has not afforded his own Vice-Presidential nominee. Even without those returns, we know that he has taken advantage of the tax code’s gray areas, including the use of offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. For all his undoubted patriotism, he evidently believes that money belongs to an empyrean far beyond such territorial attachments.

But holding foreign bank accounts is not a substitute for experience in foreign policy. In that area, he has outsourced his views to mediocre, ideologically driven advisers like Dan Senor and John Bolton. He speaks in Cold War jingoism. On a brief foray abroad this summer, he managed, in rapid order, to insult the British, to pander crudely to Benjamin Netanyahu in order to win the votes and contributions of his conservative Jewish and Evangelical supporters, and to dodge ordinary questions from the press in Poland. On the thorniest of foreign-policy problems—from Pakistan to Syria—his campaign has offered no alternatives except a set of tough-guy slogans and an oft-repeated faith in “American exceptionalism.”

In pursuit of swing voters, Romney and Ryan have sought to tamp down, and keep vague, the extremism of their economic and social commitments. But their signals to the Republican base and to the Tea Party are easily read: whatever was accomplished under Obama will be reversed or stifled. Bill Clinton has rightly pointed out that most Presidents set about fulfilling their campaign promises. Romney, despite his pose of chiselled equanimity, has pledged to ravage the safety net, oppose progress on marriage equality, ignore all warnings of ecological disaster, dismantle health-care reform, and appoint right-wing judges to the courts. Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices are in their seventies; a Romney Administration may well have a chance to replace two of the more liberal incumbents, and Romney’s adviser in judicial affairs is the embittered far-right judge and legal scholar Robert Bork. The rightward drift of a court led by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito—a drift marked by appalling decisions like Citizens United—would only intensify during a Romney Presidency. The consolidation of a hard-right majority would be a mortal threat to the ability of women to make their own decisions about contraception and pregnancy, the ability of institutions to alleviate the baneful legacies of past oppression and present prejudice, and the ability of American democracy to insulate itself from the corrupt domination of unlimited, anonymous money. Romney has pronounced himself “severely conservative.” There is every reason to believe him.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/10/29/121029taco_talk_editors#ixzz2Av3b0Tkz

F.C. Judd

 

From Sonic Router on the work of F.C. Judd:

Early one morning in late December, after waking up to an impending hangover and a spectacular bout of heartburn, I sat up watching countless television spots and documentaries about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the forgotten composers whose pioneering work in electronic recording techniques often gets a little overlooked. Amongst the footage of John Baker, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and the like, somewhere within the reams of tape and the clunky, primitive instruments strewed around the rooms, it was easy to see the majesty of the processes they were toying with; and it’s impossible, even for me, to gloss over the affect that musique concrète, and the other sounds they championed, has had on modern music.

Those early electro acoustic experiments and the ones like it that were researched and constructed across the world in sound laboratories much like the BBC’s fabled Workshop, really do go a lot further, and a lot deeper than the warbles on episodes of the Clangers or the Doctor Who theme tune. Their work infected a lot of young minds and it continues to inspire people to think outside of the realms of Logic’s in-built synthesizers. There’s a method and a deep involvement that went into the aural (and tape) manipulation of the sounds that everyday objects make when you hit them and it’s a process that’s fascinated me since as a teenager I heard the end squall of Queen Of The Stone Age’s ‘I Was A Teenage Hand Model’ – not that the noisy ending of the said song has anything to do with the concrète approach, per se; it’s just that the oscillations really penetrated something in me; and looking back at it now I can kind of draw some kind of a shallow parallel.

Without veering off into completely irrelevant territory, it’s amongst these first experiments into sound processing that the work of one Frederick Charles Judd should exist. A lost British electronic music pioneer and a Radiophonic contemporary, Judd was locked into building machines and a wide range of electronic activities during the 1950s and 60s. The author of 11 books on the subject of his work he also made a synthesizer that pre dates anything like the Moog etc without having any formal training. He devised Chromasonics, a way to visualize sound in full colour using an old television and signals sent from tone generators or tape recorders; he recorded the first entirely electronic soundtrack (using no conventionally scored music) for British Television, on a science fiction puppet show called Space Patrol and he was, rather fittingly, made editor of Amateur Tape Recording magazine in 1963, after a three year period as technical editor.

Romney's Zomby Apocalypse Vision from Screenwriter Joss Whedon

Dismantling America

Krugman's Op-Ed today continues to hammer home the realities that await us under a Romney regime-it's incredible that the U.S. population have to be reminded of the obvious:

But one thing is clear: If he wins, Medicaid — which now covers more than 50 million Americans, and which President Obama would expand further as part of his health reform — will face savage cuts. Estimates suggest that a Romney victory would deny health insurance to about 45 million people who would have coverage if he lost, with two-thirds of that difference due to the assault on Medicaid.

So this election is, to an important degree, really about Medicaid. And this, in turn, means that you need to know something more about the program.

For while Medicaid is generally viewed as health care for the nonelderly poor, that’s only part of the story. And focusing solely on who Medicaid covers can obscure an equally important fact: Medicaid has been more successful at controlling costs than any other major part of the nation’s health care system.

So, about coverage: most Medicaid beneficiaries are indeed relatively young (because older people are covered by Medicare) and relatively poor (because eligibility for Medicaid, unlike Medicare, is determined by need). But more than nine million Americans benefit from both Medicare and Medicaid, and elderly or disabled beneficiaries account for the majority of Medicaid’s costs. And contrary to what you may have heard, the great majority of Medicaid beneficiaries are in working families.

For those who get coverage through the program, Medicaid is a much-needed form of financial aid. It is also, quite literally, a lifesaver. Mr. Romney has said that a lack of health insurance doesn’t kill people in America; oh yes, it does, and states that expand Medicaid coverage show striking drops in mortality.

So Medicaid does a vast amount of good. But at what cost? There’s a widespread perception, gleefully fed by right-wing politicians and propagandists, that Medicaid has “runaway” costs. But the truth is just the opposite. While costs grew rapidly in 2009-10, as a depressed economy made more Americans eligible for the program, the longer-term reality is that Medicaid is significantly better at controlling costs than the rest of our health care system.

How much better? According to the best available estimates, the average cost of health care for adult Medicaid recipients is about 20 percent less than it would be if they had private insurance. The gap for children is even larger.

And the gap has been widening over time: Medicaid costs have consistently risen a bit less rapidly than Medicare costs, and much less rapidly than premiums on private insurance.

How does Medicaid achieve these lower costs? Partly by having much lower administrative costs than private insurers. It’s always worth remembering that when it comes to health care, it’s the private sector, not government programs, that suffers from stifling, costly bureaucracy.

Also, Medicaid is much more effective at bargaining with the medical-industrial complex.

Consider, for example, drug prices. Last year a government study compared the prices that Medicaid paid for brand-name drugs with those paid by Medicare Part D — also a government program, but one run through private insurance companies, and explicitly forbidden from using its power in the market to bargain for lower prices. The conclusion: Medicaid pays almost a third less on average. That’s a lot of money.

Is Medicaid perfect? Of course not. Most notably, the hard bargain it drives with health providers means that quite a few doctors are reluctant to see Medicaid patients. Yet given the problems facing American health care — sharply rising costs and declining private-sector coverage — Medicaid has to be regarded as a highly successful program. It provides good if not great coverage to tens of millions of people who would otherwise be left out in the cold, and as I said, it does much right to keep costs down.

By any reasonable standard, this is a program that should be expanded, not slashed — and a major expansion of Medicaid is part of the Affordable Care Act.

Why, then, are Republicans so determined to do the reverse, and kill this success story? You know the answers. Partly it’s their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance. Partly it’s the fact that Medicaid’s success is a reproach to their antigovernment ideology.

The question — and it’s a question the American people will answer very soon — is whether they’ll get to indulge these prejudices at the expense of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Fabian Oefner

Interview with Fabian Offner at t-squat.com :

Can you explain your overall artistic ethos? What compels you to create beautiful imagery?

My work is based on how we perceive the world around us. I often use the scientific phenomena that we are all surrounded with, being it sound waves that make colours dance, or magnetic forces that create pop-art like paintings. My aim is to show them the unseen in a poetic way, inviting the viewer to stop for a moment and think about the world around them.

The work you are creating is as artistic as it is scientific. Where do your ideas for creating such sublime photographs come from?

I have always had an avid interest in science. Most of my ideas come from articles that I read, like a specific phenomenon in science or sometimes from images of others, like the photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope, which led to the creation of the “Nebulae” series.

Tell us about the kind of studies you have partaken in to educate and up-skill yourself to a point where you can create the work you do.

I have attended art school and I have a degree in product design, so I come from an artistic background. This might seem surprising, since my present work has very little to do with product design. There are a lot of things you are not taught in a class or during study, that you simply have to find out for yourself. What I think is much more important than having a degree, is having a distinctive curiosity about the world around you- and trying to respond to it.

Claudia Peña Salinas

Objetos Extraviados

From Queens International:

How did you arrive at the work that you are making presently?

I began as a painter. Most of my work dealt with psychological architectural spaces and geometry. Tape lines and splashes. I was collaging bits of cloth and found pages. They often had things extending onto the floor, like a rug that a viewer would have to step on in order to take a closer look at the painting. Eventually, I started to look at the work of painter Frank Stella, and it led me to a series of pieces that had as their logic the repetition of one form. These were large MDF pieces that combined as puzzles flush to the wall and floor. At this point, I felt I had purged the personal out of my work, and that it was not the way I wanted to work. I began to take more photographs, spend more time outside of the studio and began to work in installation. I arrived at the table as a form that allowed for the inclusion of objects, paintings and photographs.

Does painting still hold much interest for you?

My work is very much rooted in painting. Often, there are paintings in my installations, or the subject is a particular painting, as in Blue Boy (2008). I stopped simply painting and went into installation as a way to deal with time and space.

I wanted the unfolding of time to come through the body in space. Painting had to become an object, not a window. I think of painting as another object in an installation; it illustrates nothing but itself, and rubs against the other objects through associations.

The Return of the NeoCons

From Stephen M. Walt's blog, a view of the resilience of neoconservatives:

The success of neoconservatism can be traced to three key strategems. The first and most obvious element is their relentless championing of America as the model for the entire world, from which our duty to export democracy supposedly follows. Never mind that neocons aren't very consistent in applying that principle (e.g., you don't hear many of them talking about using American power to advance the democratic rights of Palestinians), and they routinely forget that their favorite tool -- military force -- is usually a very bad way to spread democracy. But their brand of jingoistic rhetoric resonates with America's deep political traditions and helps them portray their critics as insufficiently devoted to America's liberal/Wilsonian ideals.

Second, and more importantly, neoconservatives understand the efficacy of taking extreme positions and sticking to them. By recommending policies that are at the very edge of what is acceptable (and sometimes a bit beyond it), neoconservatives seek to gradually drag the consensus in their direction. Just look at the slow-motion march toward preventive war against Iran, where constant pressure from the right (and the Israel lobby) has forced even a sensible leader like President Obama to constantly reiterate his willingness to use military force if it becomes necessary to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Such threats merely increase Iran's interest in some sort of deterrent, of course, but strategic consistency is less important than making sure Washington takes a tough line.

Interestingly enough, this tactic has some grounding in behavioral economics. In a justifiably famous experiment reported in the Journal of Marketing Research, Itamar Simonson and Amos Tversky showed that consumer choices were powerfully influenced by "framing effects," and in particular, by the set of choices that the test subjects were given. When the subjects were offered a choice between a cheap camera with relatively few features and a more expensive camera with lots of them, their choices divided more-or-less evenly between the two. But when a similar group was given the same two options plus a third -- an even more expensive camera with even more features -- the percentage that preferred the middle choice rose dramatically. Why? Because being presented with the option of a really expensive camera made choosing the second most expensive seem less extravagant: It became the sensible "compromise" choice.

And that's the genius of neoconservatism's frequently outlandish policy recommendations. They are always calling for the United States to spend excessive amounts of money on defense, to threaten potential enemies with dire consequences if they don't bend to our will, and to use force against just about anyone that the neocons don't like (and it's a long list). No president -- not even George W. Bush -- has done everything the neocons wanted, but by constantly pushing for more, it makes doing at least part of what they want seem like a sensible, moderate course. And as we saw after 9/11, every now and then the stars may line up and the neocons will get what they're pushing for (See under: Iraq). Too bad it never works out well when they do.

Neoconservatism's final strand of twisted genius is its imperviousness to contrary evidence. Because most of their prescriptions are so extreme, they can explain away failure by claiming that the country just didn't follow their advice with sufficient enthusiasm. If we lost in Iraq, that's because Bush didn't attack Iran and Syria too, or it's because Obama decided to withdraw before the job was really done. (Such claims are mostly nonsense, of course, but who cares?) If Afghanistan turned into a costly quagmire on Bush's watch, it's because Clinton and Bush refused to ramp up defense spending as much as the neocons wanted. If we now headed for the exit with little show for our effort, it's because we didn't send a big enough Afghan surge in 2009-2010. For neocons, policy failure can always be explained by saying that feckless politicians just didn't go as far as the neocons demanded, which means their advice can never be fully discredited.

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The Sea and Cake at LPR

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- Sea Cake in NYC

From a review of their latest album at Pitchfork:

Nothing reminds you that you've been taking the Sea and Cake for granted quicker than listening to a new Sea and Cake album. When they play together, John McEntire, Sam Prekop, Archer Prewitt, and Eric Claridge occupy an indie rock niche all their own, and their utter consistency at turning out well-wrought, prettily cerebral records might help explain why they've never met a hype cycle that paid them any mind in spite of the quality of their music. Trends come and go, but the Sea and Cake are more or less constant, and have been for almost 20 years. Even when what they do comes into vogue, as it has a few times, they seem to be left out of the think pieces because they're not new.

Dispositionally, their music sits in an open-air bar on a beach in St. Kitts, but sonically, it sits on a beach between Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan, with an occasional chill in the breeze blowing off the water. Sam Prekop's voice is a breathy wisp that champions tone over diction, and as such it fits in with the self-effacing playing of his bandmates. Listening to the gorgeously captured sounds on Runner, the band's 10th LP (counting last year's relatively concise The Moonlight Butterfly), it's clear that these are highly accomplished musicians, but there's not a single moment where all that prodigious technique isn't kept on a tight leash. Prewitt might unleash a ragged and fiery lead on "Skyscrapers" after the first verse, but McEntire's neat and orderly production keeps it from raising the temperature of the song too much.

Gaza Aid Ship Detained by Israel

From Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog:

The Israeli navy boarded the aid ship Estelle in international waters on Saturday, illegally commandeering it and kidnapping the 30 persons aboard, including five European parliamentarians and Canadian former member of parliament Jim Manly, who is also a retired minister of the United Church.

The Israeli authorities have imposed a blockade on the civilian Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip. Although the blockade does still block some key imports, its major impact comes from Israel’s refusal to allow most goods produced in Gaza to be exported or to allow its population freely to travel out of the Strip. The blockade has produced massive unemployment and poverty, lack of potable water, widespread food insecurity, startlingly high levels of anemia, and the stunting of poorer childrens’ growth. Since Israel is recognized by the UN as the Occupying authority in Gaza, for it to subject the non-combatant population of 1.7 million to this blockade is illegal in international law and contravenes the 1949 Geneva convention on the treatment of Occupied populations (a set of laws designed to forestall further excesses such as those of the Fascist, Axis powers in the 1930s and 1940s).

David S. Ware dead at 62

Remembering the young tenor I saw perform at the Corocran with Cecil Taylor in the early 80's-From the LA Times, Chris Barton writes:

Fans of jazz and improvised music are mourning with the unexpected loss of saxophonist David S. Ware, who died Thursday night as a result of complications from a 2009 kidney transplant. He was 62 years old.

A free-blowing, modern-day titan of the saxophone, Ware was not the kind of player who could've been heard at a mainstream event like the Playboy Jazz Festival. In fact it's difficult to find just about any record of the New York-based artist playing L.A. apart from a couple of '70s dates as part of Cecil Taylor's band -- and perhaps Ware's health contributed to Taylor's recent decision to cancel an upcoming L.A. performance.

But Ware was a favorite among music fans of all kinds looking for an heir to the explorations of late-period John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler. His reach was broad enough that two of his albums were reviewed on the indie king-making website Pitchfork in the early 2000s.

Critic and author Garry Giddins hailed Ware's group as "the best small jazz band working today" in the Village Voice, and in a memorable 2006 essay by Howard Hampton in McSweeney's The Believer, Howard Hampton called him "the last of the saxophone colossi."

It's the kind of talk that can send the curious running for a listen, and fortunately his work is easy to find thanks in no small part to being signed to Columbia Records in the '90s, a somewhat startling reality to consider given the current jazz marketplace but a reality thanks to Ware being championed by Branford Marsalis, who at the time was a creative consultant for the label.

For those looking to get to know what was lost in Ware, the best place to begin could be where I also started, with the sprawling but breathtaking "Live in the World" (Thirsty Ear). Over three discs and nearly four hours of music, you can hear Ware's expressive voice over three live recordings from Europe, one taken in 1998, the other two in 2003.

The 1998 recording showcases a remarkable ensemble that features Ware with pianist Matthew Shipp, bassist William Parker and Susie Ibarra on drums (the other sets swap out drummers Hamid Drake and Guillermo E. Brown on drums). Watch a video below to hear the first 10 minutes (!) of the recording's immersive half-hour-plus opener, "Aquarian Sound."