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

The Putin Connection

Interview with Greg Miller at LARB, author of  The Apprentice:

ANDY FITCH: As The Apprentice’s epilogue takes up one last time this book’s persistent question of why a boorish Donald Trump would present himself with such unswerving servility in pursuit of political partnership with Vladimir Putin, you quietly set aside the need for any systematic conspiratorial scenario in which Putin holds salacious sexual footage or compromising financial dirt on Trump (neither of which possibilities you deny), and you redirect attention to a more obvious mode of collusion that “has always been hiding right in front of us…. it is Putin who Trump counts on to maintain the fantasy that Russia’s interference wasn’t real…. That may be all the leverage that Putin needs.” Could you describe how you see this easily overlooked collusion shaping the broader two-year timeline you track?

GREG MILLER: So this speaks to how difficult it remains for many of us to understand Trump’s motivations, and to how we still look for explanations of his behavior that actually would make sense to us, right? We can imagine this idea of some tape existing that shows Trump with prostitutes. But even if such a tape did exist, it wouldn’t necessarily give Putin all that much leverage on a guy who seems to shrug off sex scandals one after the other. I actually find the idea of murky financial entanglements with Russia a much more compelling explanation for Trump’s behavior, but still sort of unproven.

And then more generally, I do believe that the disorienting way Trump carries himself blinds us to realities staring right at us. In the book I ask readers to engage in a mental exercise. If we look back at that moment during the campaign when he says something like “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you look for Hillary’s missing emails,” many people in the press responded basically by asking: “What the hell was that?” Whereas if Trump had not made that statement at a campaign rally, and instead had transmitted such a request in secret to the Kremlin, we would have been absolutely alarmed. We’d understand what we were encountering. There would be no doubt, no confusion. But because he did it in the open, we don’t quite know how to process it.

Well again in terms of the obvious: I don’t want to waste anybody’s time with yet another armchair psychoanalysis of Trump, but do parallels to how this president needs to think of himself as an independently successful businessman (perhaps specifically in his father’s eyes, yet with the complicating complicity of his father having provided hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance) stand out to you as much as they do to me?

I haven’t thought about this with any Freudian parallel in mind, but that comparison interests me. Creation myths and self-creation myths matter a lot to Trump. He has to believe that he’s exceptional. It could shatter his pretty fragile ego to consider this idea that he doesn’t single-handedly deserve whatever success has come his way.

And we can now grasp much more clearly this decades-old creation myth about his fortune, in which Trump claims only to have received a tiny loan from his father, which Trump then parlayed into a real-estate empire. That type of fabrication does seem comparable in some ways to this creation myth around the 2016 election, in which Trump feels the need to insist that he won a historic victory, entirely thanks to his own charisma and strategic brilliance — again with no other forces at work here. He just can’t admit to that possibility. And he basically only has one person willing to stay out on that long, long limb with him, and it’s Putin, right? Nobody even in Trump’s own administration believes in that myth at this point. And to “prove” his myth, Trump only has one potential source of evidence: Vladimir Putin’s denials.

And here, in terms laid out by your book’s title, could we start considering a broader pattern of how, as soon as one forgoes the distraction of following Trump’s aggressive public antics, one sees this unexpected president’s ongoing confrontation with the fact that “Now he was the one…utterly unprepared, in dire need of a steadying hand…now he was the apprentice”)? But first, one explanatory element in your highly personalized account of Trump’s behavior towards Putin stood out unresolved for me. Why would a paranoid Trump, prone to attack when feeling exposed, and perhaps sensing Putin’s power to determine whether this delusional president ever faces up to the fact that “his victory might not have been earned free and clear,” still stay so fixated specifically on prospects for friendship with Putin?

I do consider that one of the real mysteries about Trump’s personality. He does, as you say, preemptively reject those from whom he fears rejection. You see this at times in his relationships with Congressional leaders, or with world leaders like Angela Merkel. And yet with Putin, Trump doesn’t seem to operate from that same defensive space. He remains in this much more odd kind of supplicant role. And again I don’t have any solid explanation for that behavior, other than what everybody can see in terms of how Trump conducts himself as president, how he talks about the office of the presidency, about leadership — consistently showing his sympathies for a strong-man model. Trump clearly admires a figure like Putin, who doesn’t have to worry about certain pesky aspects of any democratic system.

Trump wishes he could emulate Putin in more ways than one. Putin doesn’t have to worry about a Mueller investigation, or an independent Justice Department, or an independent judiciary, or a secure and critical press, or substantial opposition parties. And if given the chance, would Trump wipe away all those parts of American political culture? Probably. I mean, I think Trump sees himself as this singular figure hindered by all of this antagonism, who otherwise could achieve the greatness that he’s destined for.

More

Tatica 95

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 -Celebrations for Tatica's 95th 

On Roy Hargrove's Passing

 

 

The talented and forceful trumpet player Roy Hargrove has passed away due to a heart attack at the young age of 49. I had seen him in the early 90's at a small Greenwich Village bar at 1 in the morning at a fundraiser  for a waitress who had recently been diagnosed with cancer. We must of been five feet from him as he played standards with soul and a power I had not seen in years. He always impressed me with his ability to cross so called musical boundaries-his album with D'Angelo or better yet his album Habana in Havana with Chucho Valdez, Gary Bartz, and David Sanchez, a great example of what Latin Jazz can accomplish.

Here is an obituary that came out a couple of hours ago-I think the news is just percolating across the jazz community- from The Dallas News:

Dallas-raised Roy Hargrove, the young jazzer born with an old soul, died Friday at the age of 49, according to his Facebook page. National Public Radio reports that the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts graduate was felled by cardiac arrest following kidney failure, after years of dialysis.

The trumpet player whose discography in time would encompass the past and future of jazz, Latin music, funk and soul was born in Waco on Oct. 16, 1969, but educated here — at Arts Magnet, but also by the likes of David "Fathead" Newman, James Clay, Marchel Ivery and Dean Hill. The latter served as band director at Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School in Oak Cliff, where Hargrove grew up. 

"He was always one to keep digging and reaching for all he could," Hill told this newspaper long ago. "We knew we had something special."

It was at Holmes where a young Roy first heard Newman, most famous for playing sax with Ray Charles in the 1950s. And it was at Holmes where he learned to mimic the solos of Maynard Ferguson and other idols.

He was, in the beginning, a straight-up bop kid. That's what caught the ear of Wynton Marsalis in 1987, during a visit to Arts Magnet in the midst of a long engagement at Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth. Marsalis was so smitten with Hargrove he invited him to share the stage — this Texas teen. Larry Clothier, who in time became Hargrove's manager and producer, told Texas Monthly nine years later Roy climbed onto the bandstand a scared kid and walked off a grown man: "When it came time, you could just see him draw himself up and expand."

Roy's recorded debut came in 1988 — on the Dallas "Arts" Jazz 1988 album, a Booker T. compilation on which he also handled some of the arrangements.

Hargrove attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston for but a single year following his graduation from Booker T. in 1988; that's how ready he was. At the age of 20 he had a record deal. He was sharing stages and studios with the likes of Sonny Rollins, Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock and the local lions whose own lineage could be traced back to John Coltrane, Red Garland, Miles Davis. He moved to New York, but came home constantly; in the day he played Sambuca in Deep Ellum so often they could have put him on the menu.

But in time the son of a record collector graduated from the old school: His bop merged into the Cuban, R&B and hip-hop lanes. His first of two Grammy Awards came in 1997, for the album Habana. He also performed with the likes of schoolmate and dear friend Erykah Badu, A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip, D'Angelo, Common, John Mayer. His fingerprints are all over such albums as Badu's Mama's Gun and Worldwide Underground, D'Angelo's Voodoo and Black Messiah.

The album Hard Groove, released in 2003 and recorded under the RH Factor moniker, was his nascent masterwork. But Hargrove's discography didn't grow much further: Five albums followed, none under his own name after 2009, though he sided on several others.

Former Star-Telegram critic Preston Jones, writing in 2016 for the Observer, said this of Hargrove's restlessness and desire to stake a claim as a musician unbound by definition:

"Fortunately for us as a culture, there are still happy warriors like Roy Hargrove," Jones wrote, "marching onto the battlefield, intent on articulating the full spectrum of feeling, one performance at a time."

But now, suddenly, unexpectedly, shockingly, those performances have come to an end.

"Everything that I do is from the creator," he once said, explaining that all his music is spiritual in some way. "All the music I play, I can't take credit for."