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Ciao Javier Marias

Javier Marias passed away this weekend before he could be given the Nobel prize for literature. Again, the irrelevancy of the Nobel shines again. Some recent influential and great writers that did receive it include: Nabakov, Borges, Cortazar, Sebald, Calvino . . . .

Here's a take on his life from The Guardian:

When Javier Marías was a student of English Philology in Madrid in the 1970s he says it was with a sense of "awe and reverence" that he would buy copies of "the then grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics. The authors ranged from Conrad to James, Faulkner to Joyce, Thomas Mann to Ford Madox Ford, Woolf to Camus. Not even Nabokov was allowed to be there." Last year Marías himself became one of just a handful of living writers to join that same list. "I must assume, therefore, that these are much less demanding times than the 1970s," he explains modestly. "But, still, I feel very honoured, even if I can't help thinking I must be a fraud."

Far from being a fraud, it is difficult to think of many other living writers who are such an obvious fit for the list. In brute commercial terms, as was noted at the time, you could say his inclusion is not a bad hedge bet from his new publisher Penguin in the event of his winning the Nobel prize, something he is regularly tipped to do. In purely literary terms there is an even more compelling case. Few writers have sustained such an engagement with the classic (Anglophone) canon. As a translator he has rendered into Spanish work by Hardy, Yeats, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger and many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, and is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare and Sterne, as well as Cervantes and Proust.

"I've never had a literary project and feel I have been improvising all my career," he recently claimed. "But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure. There is also persuasion, marriage and love. But these things are the matter of literature, not just of my books. The history of literature is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before."

This flair for improvisation has seen him selling millions of books that have been translated into more than 40 languages. His 12th novel, The Infatuations, is published in English next month, and work such as All Souls, A Heart So White, and, more recently, his monumental Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, have received almost universal critical acclaim. And he has not only been garlanded with prizes. Among his other titles he is King of Redonda, a real, if uninhabited, lump of Caribbean rock, the monarchy of which has been passed down through a line of writers.

"I've taken my responsibilities lightly," he smiles, "but I do follow the tradition of an intellectual nobility." He funds a literary prize and awards dukedoms to the winners, which so far have included among others Alice Munro, AS Byatt, William Boyd and Umberto Eco. "JM Coetzee was the first winner, and I was delighted that he accepted and joined in with the playfulness of it. Maybe it is time that I should start thinking about an heir. I inherited through an abdication, so I shall have to find another writer, as it is not passed on by blood but by letters."

Marías has never visited Redonda and lives in a book-packed apartment overlooking one of Madrid's oldest squares where he works on an electric typewriter, doesn't have internet and is equally old-fashioned in his prodigious cigarette consumption. He has a long-term partner, but she lives in Barcelona. "And that is usually my lot. Either my girlfriends have been married at a time when there was no divorce in Spain, or they lived somewhere else or there was something else in the way."

The Infatuations, featuring a rare Marías female narrator, is, among other things, a cool-eyed examination of love; in fact "Los enamoramientos", the Spanish title, could also be translated as "The Crushes". Maria has breakfast in the same café every morning, where she observes a married couple with the same routine. Some time after the couple stop coming to the café Maria learns that the husband has been brutally murdered, and she becomes embroiled in the life of the widow and the emotional ramifications of the husband's death.

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MAGA Republicans

 

From Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic:

MAGA Republicans are rather a threat because their leader does not accept the outcome of elections when he loses them; because he does not believe that the rule of law applies to him; because he does not adhere to the culture of restraint, tolerance, and moderation; and because he is now seeking to help elect other politicians who feel the same way. In their drive to change the political system, and to ensure that they can retain power even if they lose, Trump’s followers have verbally and sometimes physically attacked Capitol police officers, election workers, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and civil servants. He and his acolytes use violent language, and they inspire violence in return. As Biden put it last night, they “tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.”

Composer, Pianist, and Photographer Sy Johnson Has Passed Away

From the NYT:

Sy Johnson, a Renaissance jazz master — pianist, composer, journalist, photographer — who made his biggest impact as a frequent arranger, orchestrator and all-around right-hand man for the celebrated bassist Charles Mingus, died on July 26 in Manhattan. He was 92.

His wife, Lois Mirviss, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of Covid-19.

The jazz critic Gary Giddins called Mr. Johnson “one of those indispensable people you never heard much about,” and few in the jazz world would disagree. He started out in the late 1950s playing piano, first in Los Angeles and then in New York. He soon branched out to arranging, working not just with Mingus but also with a host of musical luminaries including the saxophonist Lee Konitz and the arranger and bandleader Quincy Jones.

He also wrote words: He conducted a seminal interview with Miles Davis and contributed record reviews to the short-lived quarterly Jazz magazine in the 1970s. He worked on Broadway and even composed his own musical, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And all along, he toted a 35-millimeter Leica camera, crafting spontaneous, intimate portraits of the jazz scene of the 1960s and ’70s. Many of his photographs were collected in a 2014 book, “Jazz: Personal Encounters.”

Abdul Wadud Gone

Vallejo Nocturno 2022 copyright- Abdul Wadud DC Space 1977

I remember seeing Abdul Wadud play numerous times at DC Space with Julius Hemphill. The two had great synergy and could improvise creatively for hours. Yes, I think in 1977 we knew the importance of both of those musicians and the sounds they created but still after those encounters I never ran into Abdul again, I believe.
From The NYT:

For many of his contemporaries, the first taste of his instrumental prowess came via his appearance on Mr. Hemphill’s 1972 album, “Dogon A.D.” (Like many important recordings featuring Mr. Wadud, it is currently not available digitally.)

Over the title track’s unusual loping groove, Mr. Wadud supported Mr. Hemphill’s saxophone lines with crying, bluesy bowed phrases as well as some select, forcefully plucked notes. Baikida Carroll, the trumpeter on that session — and, like Mr. Hemphill, a member of the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group — remembered Mr. Wadud’s insightful questioning during rehearsals about that composition’s 11/16 meter.

“He asked Julius about the relation of the drum part and the cello part, how they hook up,” Mr. Carroll recalled in an interview, adding that he “pointedly observed” Mr. Wadud’s working methods “because I was, like, This is the cat!”

The composer, trombonist and scholar George Lewis said in an interview that he regarded Mr. Wadud’s playing on “Dogon A.D.” as a landmark of 20th-century music. He tied that performance to Mr. Wadud’s later solo recording, “By Myself,” which is currently out of print.

“There’s the electricity — he’s amplified — there’s the funk, there’s the off-meter; a lot of the stuff that turns up being crystallized in ‘By Myself’ is sort of foreshadowed in ‘Dogon A.D.,’” Mr. Lewis said. “It’s like James Brown — but I bet even James Brown couldn’t have done it if it had been in 11/16.” (A 1977 live performance of the piece is included on a boxed set of Mr. Hemphill’s work, released in 2021 by New World Records.)

Mr. Wadud did not record much of his own music, aside from his 1977 solo LP, but his solo work had an impact. Writing in The New York Times about the Abdul original “Camille,” from “By Myself,” the cellist Tomeka Reid praised him for using “the whole range of the cello” and moving “between lyrical, free playing and groove with ease, something I strive to do in my own work.” In a recent interview, Ms. Reid added, “What Pablo Casals did for the Bach suites, I feel like Abdul Wadud did for the new generation of cello in jazz.”

Around the time of “By Myself,” Mr. Lewis chose Mr. Wadud for an ensemble that performed the Lewis composition “Monads,” his attempt to “come to terms” with the graphic scores of the composer Morton Feldman.

“Abdul knew all about that kind of thing; he knew more about it than I did,” Mr. Lewis said. “That combination, of having the strong kind of Black bass and having all these other possibilities — equally strong — made him someone you could work with who was super versatile and could do anything.”

Order & Law

From Charles Blow at the NYT:

The criminal justice system — including law enforcement — is not meant to regulate the wealthy, it is meant to regulate the poor. In this way, the police are a tool of control wielded by the powerful rather than a means of controlling the powerful.

Perhaps no one illustrates this dynamic better than Donald Trump. He pitched himself as Mr. Law and Order to get elected, and he ratcheted up his rhetorical support for the police when people complained about police misconduct and brutality, particularly as it was aimed at Black people and those protesting in support of Black lives.

To Trump, the police were exerting pressure on populations that people like him thought needed to be controlled.

However, when Trump’s mob stormed the Capitol, injuring and even leading to the deaths of police officers, Trump fell silent. For days after the riots, he didn’t acknowledge the death of officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered two strokes in the wake of the violence at the Capitol.

Not only did Trump not reach out to Sicknick’s family, he also didn’t send a letter of condolence.

The only thing he did was to sign a proclamation that flags be flown at half-staff a week after the riots “as a sign of respect for the service and sacrifice of United States Capitol Police Officers Brian D. Sicknick and Howard Liebengood, and all Capitol Police Officers and law enforcement across this great Nation.” The proclamation made no mention of the fact that they died after the riots, riots he helped incite, riots that he continues to defend.

Trump has consistently minimized the insurrection, and indirectly, minimized the trauma inflicted on the officers.

The officers protecting the Capitol were, in the minds of people like Trump, trying to control the wrong population.

But the entire episode exposes the lie that people like that tell about supporting the police out of principle. In fact, they only appreciate the knife when they hold the handle and the blade is pointed away from them.

 

After Trump failed to mention Sicknick in the days following his death, one top Trump campaign aide, Matthew Wolking, texted another, Tim Murtaugh: “That’s enraging to me. Everything he said about supporting law enforcement was a lie.”

Of course it was a lie. Much of the so-called Blue Lives Matter movement was a lie. It was simply a retort to Black Lives Matter. It was an attempt at silencing rather than solidarity.

This week, Trump returned to Washington for the first time since he left office. And the speech he gave was another law and order speech, returning to the theme of empowering the police, calling for the execution of drug dealers, and describing the country as a “cesspool of crime.”

In all this, he encouraged cities to reinstate racialized stop-and-frisk policies, because “it works,” and called on them to flood the streets with more officers and pull back on accountability for those officers’ actions.

Trump said, “There is no longer respect for the law, and there certainly is no order.”

Clearly, irony escapes the man.

Beyond Capitalism Towards Modern Enlightenment

From a lively response to several reviews of his recent book, Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, he writes at LARB a confirmation that life as we know it is far from our control in the current ways society is organized and even among those in agreement there is disagreement on what a truly free existence would actually look like:

By contrast, This Life seeks to challenge the very measure of value that shapes the production of wealth under capitalism. There is no shortage of rhetorical indictments of capitalism, but what we need is a profound definition and analysis of capitalism that can illuminate the historical conditions under which we live, as well as the principles for an economic form of life beyond capitalism. That is what I set out to provide.

Given the stakes of the project, I am deeply grateful to Los Angeles Review of Books for organizing this symposium and for the critical engagement of the six distinguished respondents, all of whose work I have learned from and admire. In responding to them, my aim is not only to defend the arguments of This Life but also to elaborate the emancipatory vision of democratic socialism at the heart of the book. Democratic socialism in my sense would be a post-capitalist form of life, which cannot be achieved merely through redistributive reforms. Rather, democratic socialism requires a revolutionary revaluation of our collective measure of value, which would abolish wage labor and transform how we reproduce our lives, all the way from our production of goods to our forms of education and other social institutions.

To grasp the meaning of such a revaluation, it is helpful to begin with Benjamin Kunkel’s response to the book. Kunkel generously emphasizes that This Life makes a “magnificent case for democratic socialism” by “wresting the indispensable slogan of freedom away from the publicists for liberal capitalism.” To this end, I argue that Marx should be understood as the most important inheritor of the modern, Enlightenment commitment to freedom. Marx has no nostalgia for the premodern world. Rather, he makes clear that both capitalism and liberalism are historical conditions of possibility for the collective emancipation that he espouses. While consistent with Marx’s vision of communism, I choose to describe the post-capitalist form of life in terms of a novel conception of democratic socialism, in order to underline that the commitment to democracy is indispensable for Marx’s critique of capitalism. Through a critique of capitalism and liberalism on their own terms, I specify the general principles of democratic socialism and elaborate their concrete implications. What I call democratic socialism is neither an imposed blueprint nor an abstract utopia. Rather, I derive the principles of democratic socialism from the commitment to universal freedom and equality that is a historical achievement of modernity.

In developing the vision of democratic socialism, I have two main aims, which are perceptively highlighted by Kunkel. At stake is both a recuperation of “the cause of freedom for the radical left” and a demonstration “through the existential register of This Life, that democratic socialism is properly the cause of everyone.” As Kunkel rightly underlines, the case for democratic socialism requires that we can explain why capitalism is a source of unfreedom not only for the working class but also for the ruling classes themselves. In short, we must be able to explain why “an ordinary citizen under democratic socialism” would have greater possibilities of leading a free life “than even an exceptionally rich person today.”

To establish my argument, I must therefore demonstrate “the existential bankruptcy of capitalist wealth,” as Kunkel vividly expresses it. He recognizes that I show the unfreedom of those “whose mortal schedule and daily priorities take shape as capital demands,” including “the comparatively well paid, the ‘privileged,’ even the working rich.” Yet Kunkel thinks my argument “could easily be appropriated by the idle rich,” since he misconstrues the notion of free time that is at the center of This Life. On Kunkel’s account, my notion of free time is an empty quantitative category: “the sheer number of free hours” in which “we might do as we please,” since we supposedly do not have to answer to any demands placed on us by others. The same conception of free time informs Michael W. Clune’s response. According to Clune, I subscribe to a notion of freedom and equality “that says you can do anything you want to do, that all desires are equally legitimate, that society plays no role in judging what form of life you should adopt, so long as you don’t harm anyone else in certain carefully delimited ways.” Indeed, Clune claims that I do not “distinguish between better and worse ways of spending one’s free time,” since my notion of free time merely amounts to “the freedom to do whatever we want.”

I am truly surprised by these assertions, since the conception of freedom they ascribe to me is one that I argue against throughout the entire book. To be free is not to be free from obligations and follow any inclination one happens to have, released from the normative question of what is the right thing to do. On the contrary, I argue that we are free precisely because the normative question of what we ought to do is always at issue for us. Being free is not a matter of being unconstrained but of being responsive to the question of what is worth doing and which ends are worthy of our devotion. From your first-person standpoint, there is always such a question at work, if only implicitly. By virtue of doing anything at all, you are in practice taking a stand on the question of what is worth doing. If there were no such question involved — if it were immediately given what to do, without any possible hesitation, deliberation, or alteration on your part — you could not even understand yourself as an agent, since there would be nothing for you to do; it would all be automatic.

By the same token, the distinction between better and worse ways of spending your time is always at stake implicitly and can become explicit. You must be able to recognize that what you are doing is not worth doing and that what you have done is not worthy of who you are trying to be. The ability to make such negative judgments is an essential part of leading a free life. That is why Clune can judge that, by his own lights, he has wasted much of his life on doing heroin, buying worthless consumer goods, and playing the computer game Slay the Spire. It is also why the free time of the idle rich can be spoiled by a sense of “guilt and futility,” as Kunkel notes, with the attendant “suicides, addictions, mortal frivolities, and terminal bad faith that plague the rich today.”

Kunkel admits that he does not know how to “articulate philosophically” why the free time of the idle rich is pervaded by pathologies, but that is because he does not grasp the notion of freedom that is at stake. In a revealing example, Kunkel assumes that “loafing” on a lawn is an inherently free activity, whereas maintaining lawns on which people can loaf is an inherently unfree activity. Socially necessary labor (e.g., “seeding, fertilizing, and mowing lawns”) would then be an external constraint on our freedom — a necessary evil that we should try to reduce as much as possible — since freedom supposedly consists in freedom from socially necessary labor. If that were my notion of free time, the idle rich would indeed be paragons of freedom, since their abundant monetary wealth apparently releases them from the pressure of obligations and leaves them open to indulge any inclination that emerges as they are loafing through their lives.

As I underscore, however, free time is not reducible to leisure time and it does not designate a merely quantitative category of time. Rather, I coin the term socially available free time to make clear that our freedom can exist only in a social form and that it always depends on the quality of our social activities. For the same reason, there is no inherent opposition between socially available free time and socially necessary labor. To have socially available free time is to be engaged in activities that we recognize as ends in themselves — which can include many forms of socially necessary labor — as distinct from activities that we recognize as mere means to an end. This is a formal distinction, in the sense that it is not given which activities should count as ends in themselves and which activities should count as mere means to an end. If you are mowing a lawn because you are cheap labor for a capitalist enterprise, your labor time is unfree and alienated, since what you are doing is merely a means to the end of earning a wage. However, if you are mowing a lawn because you are committed to the flourishing of green spaces in the society of which you are a part, your socially necessary labor can itself be an expression of your freedom, since your labor is a way of participating in and contributing to a social good that you recognize as an end in itself. Inversely, there is no positive form of freedom in being “free” from obligations. Loafing on a lawn is itself a form of unfreedom if you cannot see your leisure time as part of a life that is good in itself.

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Some Shots from NYC

Finally went to NYC for a business trip and had some free time to wander around and also capture the surrealism of conferences. Here is what we found.

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-Quirks NYC

The Missing Genius

From writer Jesse Goin at his Crow With No Mouth site:

When Terry Jennings was 20 years old, in December 1960, he was invited to present his music in Yoko Ono’s Manhattan loft, along with fellow composers and close friends Richard Maxwell, Terry Riley and La Monte Young. Jennings obliged with nine pieces. We can now look back and consider this: that was more than half of his extant available compositions.

We can also do this: we can hear about 10 of his available works scattered across a clutch of CDs, and a few performances via YouTube and Ubuweb. All but the five piano miniatures found on the remarkable 2009 release Lost Daylight are of uneven audio quality, to put it generously. What we cannot do-and I have made every effort for the past year to do so- is discover more than a few pages of critical texts about his stunningly beautiful, prescient music. Nor can you avail yourself of but a few photographs telling even a part of his story.

Since hearing Winter Trees and the four other short pieces of Lost Daylight nearly ten years ago, I have periodically returned to Jennings’ music. Naturally, plumbing the 30 minutes of the resonant, floating world of those five pieces, breathed into the present moment by the extraordinary John Tilbury, I wanted to hear more. I began my search.

There is evidence, more or less, of 16 compositions, less than 10 available on CD. Outside of Lost Daylight, Jennings’ work can only be found on several anthology collections, mainly of the music of John Cale. The record of his public performances are few-as I said, several can be found streaming with poor audio quality. Jennings played numerous private concerts at Cal Arts with Charlemagne Palestine, as well as happenings like the Ono event. Fragments exist of those encounters.

This impoverished legacy has nagged at me- those who heard his music when the eighteen-year old stepped out of his parent’s strict upper class home into the company of the twenty-something avant gardists we now regard as the 60s West Coast minimalist constellation – Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Dennis Johnson and Harold Budd- to share his spare, transfixing pieces, were astonished. Young, in his 2006 program notes to a Cal Arts performance of Jennings’ String Quartet, called him “the most talented musician I know.” Riley described him as “a musician of great originality and expressive power.” Budd, asked about Jennings legacy by American Music editor Brett Boutwell, replied “Has any American composer done more than Winter Trees?” When Jennings visited England in 1970, his piano music was instantly embraced by Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury; 39 years later, Tilbury would see his realization of five of Jennings’ piano pieces released by Another Timbre, the aforementioned Lost Daylight.  Cale, Johnson and Riley have all stated in interviews over the years Jennings was a “natural”, who created brief, brilliant works that were studies in the play of time and memory, privileging silence and space, augurs of the concerns taken up by many composers three decades later.

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Music Podcast: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/jessewgoin19913/episodes/2022-06-23T14_02_15-07_00

Hido's POV from an Interview

Interview with Todd Hido at Lens Culture:

LC: In your opinion, what are some of the qualities that make some photographic portraits stand out and apart from ordinary photos of people? Can you offer some examples of great photo portraits that hold power for you?

TH: Richard Avedon’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe. It’s the epitome for me of an unguarded portrait. It was apparently taken at a moment when she didn’t realize she was supposed to be “on,” and it shows what I gather is the exact opposite of what it was she was trying to portray, most likely your typical flirty persona. But what it actually shows is a person that seems to be lost within themselves and looking very much inward.

Now, of course nobody knows what Marilyn was feeling at that moment and we all know that photography is the best truth teller and the best liar all at the same time. And things magically appear different when they’re photographed, as Mr. Gary Winogrand used to say. So that leaves us with what I believe is the most important part of photography, that is that we the viewers fill the photograph with meaning and we bring our own issues and concerns with us.

LC: As a teacher, what kinds of advice do you give your students when it comes to preparing for, and making, successful portraits?

TH: To be kind is most important. After that, be prepared with a plan of how you’re going to make the picture. An example in my case would be, every time I photograph somebody, I always scout out the spot I’m going to photograph them in and try to anticipate what the light is going to be like and modify it if needed.

Also, one other thing that is very important, is what the person will wear in the photograph. Wardrobe is obviously a very important component in photographs. You could either go with whatever it is they’re wearing if you’re bound to reality, but if you’re not, it’s very good to have the person bring several different things to wear because having the right clothing makes a tremendous difference. I usually opt for dark solids because it makes their face be what’s highlighted in the resulting portrait.

LC: When you are working with models for your own photography work, do you consider those portraits, or self-portraits, or some other kind of art altogether?

TH: I would consider the work I do with models to be a partial hybrid between who they actually are and what persona myself and the subject jointly decide we want to create. Very often, the kind of work I do lends itself to the opportunity to explore memories of people we used to know or projections of people we might want to be.

LC: Much of your artwork seems infused with psychological power and mysterious implications. The exterior of a home at night could in some ways be considered to be a portrait of those people who inhabit it. Can you talk about how a photographer can infuse his or her images with emotions and a heightened sense of being in a charged moment?

TH: That is a complicated question to answer because for every person it would be different. As an artist I have always felt that my task is not to create meaning but to charge the air so that meaning can occur. In all my pictures of people or places I see something of myself…it is no mystery that we can only photograph effectively what we are truly interested in or—maybe more importantly—are grappling with. Often unconsciously. Otherwise the photographs are merely about an idea or a concept—that stuff eventually falls flat for me—there must be something more, some emotional hook for it to really work.

LC: Can you give an example of a portrait that you have made that you feel is especially successful? Will you walk us through the process a bit, and talk about how and why you ended up with the result that pleases you?

TH: Every picture is different. Some effortlessly occur, and some are thoroughly belabored, and one approach isn’t necessarily better than the others. A picture that I will talk about is the picture that is the front cover of the French edition of my mid-career survey, Intimate Distance. The photo is of a friend whom I have worked with more than anyone else, over a period of nearly 10 years. Her name is Khrystyna Kazakova and this particular photograph was made for a fashion magazine that was allowing me to take up 20 of their pages with my artwork. Because of the nature of shooting for a fashion magazine, I had the blessing of having a wardrobe stylist and a hair and makeup person. Those are things that I don’t often use, but when you have access to collaborators like that, you can make something that is different from what you normally do. I also want to say that as a photographer, I have acted many times as my own stylist and often a model is very well versed at doing their own makeup, so don’t think that you need a professional crew to make something that is outstanding.

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A Source of Our Problems

During my career in corporate America I remember running into the senior executives who ruled by the Welch principles-they all seem disconnected from reality, firing their bottom 10% of their rated employees and outsourcing the most critical work to India or Bulgaria. Here is clip from Gelles at the NYT who just wrote a book on this brute:

Almost immediately after Mr. Welch retired in September 2001 with a $417 million severance package, G.E. went into a tailspin from which it would never recover.

His pupils, though, went on to run dozens of other major companies, including Home Depot, Albertson’s, Chrysler and Boeing. Most of them failed.

And in the decades since Mr. Welch assumed power, the economy at large has come to resemble his skewed priorities. Wages stagnated and jobs moved overseas. C.E.O. pay went stratospheric and buybacks and dividends boomed. Factories closed and companies found ways to pay fewer taxes.

Beyond his enduring influence on the economy, Mr. Welch also redefined what it meant to be a boss, personifying an aggressive, materialistic style of management that endures to this day.

“Jack was the rock star C.E.O. of my era,” said Lynn Forester de Rothschild, one of the rare female media moguls of the 1980s. “We all thought Jack was doing everything right and that success was defined by meeting quarterly earnings to the penny.”

In retirement, Mr. Welch continued to hold sway over the business world as an elder statesman, penning books and columns, and appearing on cable news to praise the executives he had groomed and continue his assault on taxation and regulation.

Mr. Welch also pursued an unexpected retirement pastime: He became an internet troll. His old friend Donald J. Trump seemed to lead the way on many conspiracy theories that Mr. Welch embraced. But by 2012, Mr. Welch was picking fights of his own with his online adversaries, trying to own the libs on Twitter and promulgating conspiracy theories about the Obama administration.

It was a career defined by a ruthless devotion to maximizing short-term profits at any cost, and punctuated by a foray into misinformation. And it opened the door to an era where billionaire C.E.O.s are endowed with vast power and near total impunity.

G.E., too, is still reckoning with Mr. Welch’s legacy. For two decades after he retired, a succession of C.E.O.s tried and failed to return the company to its former glory. Then last year, G.E. management admitted defeat and made an announcement — the company would be broken up for good.