Better in Black and White?

Monday, September 7, 2020
Thanks to my brother for discovering this fabulous website.  "Between 1939 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration collaborated with the New York City Tax Department to collect photographs of every building in the five boroughs of New York City."  Recently, they were digitized and mapped, allowing you to pull up every image.  Amazing.
https://1940s.nyc/map/photo/nynyma_rec0040_1_00842_0021#15.07/40.74107/-73.98719/0/6

Here, for instance, was my boyhood home shortly before I arrived.  

We lived downstairs in a two-bedroom apartment; the owner lived upstairs.  My father parked his car in the garage at the end of the alley.  The public school I attended, with a big schoolyard accommodating every Brooklyn-certified sport, was diagonally across the street.  Directly opposite was an empty lot, running the whole block.  A kid's paradise.

. . .

When I think of music played outdoors on a city's streets, New Orleans and Buenos Aires come to mind.  However, there may be a greater variety in the Holy Land once you step into a park.  Central Park, Prospect Park, Soundview Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Jackie Robinson Park, Clove Lakes Park, Von King Park, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Betsy Head Park, Springfield Park, Queensbridge Park, Crotona Park, East River Park, Marcus Garvey Park, Corporal Thompson Park all had free public musical performances last summer, the summer of 2019, maybe the Last Summer.   https://www.thrillist.com/events/new-york/free-summer-outdoor-concerts-music-festivals-in-nyc

The stylistic range was equally broad -- Arab rap, gospel, bluegrass, "French fusion hip-hop/pop", salsa, Contemporary Taiwanese, "Electric cumbia", "Mash-up funk" and more.  And this was just the official list.  You'll find buskers, "performing in public places for gratuities," in the parks and other random places throughout the city.  While organized performances have been shut down by Covid-19, busking continues. 

Saturday, I strolled over to Riverside Park at 84th Street to hear the Louis Armstrong Eternity Band, at the suggestion of Paul Hecht, Thespian Emeritus.  The group consists of a trumpet, trombone, banjo, clarinet, tuba and drums playing traditional jazz, befitting its name.  A few people sought out the group, which must make regular appearances at that location, but the other 4 dozen or so people who stopped to listen paused while walking with dog, without dog, biking, pushing a baby carriage or jogging.  It made for a pleasant interlude, especially since the next socially-distanced Bruce Springsteen concert is probably years away.
. . .

Even further in the future is the completion of John Cage's musical work As Slow As Possible, and there's no mistake about it.  A church in Germany began playing the piece in 2001 and is on pace to finish it in 2640. 
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54041568

I may sound like a Philistine, but what's the point?
. . .

Sunday night, I listened to a discussion of "High Impact Election Opportunities," efforts to make the forthcoming presidential election reasonably fair and honest.  I learned that, among others, these three organizations are conducting effective local ground-level campaigns opposing explicit voter suppression efforts.

https://www.thevoterproject.com (Pennsylvania)

acluga.org/donate (Georgia)

https://www.aclumich.org/en/donate (Michigan)

The checks are in the mail.  Not really, because all you have to do is fill in a few boxes on the screen.

. . .

A much discussed essay in the Sunday paper was "Disdain for the Less Educated Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice," by Michael Sandel, the very popular Harvard professor of political philosophy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/opinion/education-prejudice.html

Sandel argues that the "credentialed" among us condescend to those without a college degree, leading to the fact that "two-thirds of whites without a college degree voted for Mr. Trump, while Hillary Clinton won more than 70 percent of voters with advanced degrees."  He maintains that "credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice." 

The most glaring fault in his reasoning is his exclusive focus on "whites without a college degree."  If any group in our country suffers from centuries of condescension and much worse it is Blacks, regardless of their level of education, and, by the way, their support for Hillary Clinton was unparalleled.  Back to Harvard, the comfy confines of credentialism, old chap.

Wednesday, September 9, 2020
I believe that racism, although easily ignored by Sandel, is the overarching influence on American public life, unfortunately.  Sometimes, though, it is not the whole story.  The New York Times ran two articles on jazz within a few days of each other, with the same writer as author of one and co-author of the other, handling race in dramatically different fashion. 

"Jazz Has Always Been Protest Music. Can It Meet This Moment?" laments the woeful condition of jazz education on American campuses, written by Giovanni Russonello, a music critic and political reporter.  "Of the more than 500 students who graduate from American universities with jazz degrees each year, less than 10 percent are Black, according to Department of Education statistics."   https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/arts/music/jazz-protest-academia.html

The fault, he contends, is that the "very institutional acceptance that many musicians sought in the mid-to-late-20th century has hitched jazz to a broken and still-segregated education system."  Where opportunities for scholarship in this field arose, "White journalists, historians and broadcasters reserved that job for themselves."  When talented Black musicians tried to enter the academy, “They kicked them out and said, let’s open the doors to ‘professionals' — primarily white instructors who weren’t top-tier public performers."  I'll allow you "professional" educators of all races to stew on that for a moment.

What the article ignores is the history of music for the last 40 years, specifically the explosive growth of hip-hop and its domination of popular music and our culture in general.  After Wynton Marsalis's appearance on March 28, 1987, name a jazz musician who appeared on "Saturday Night Live"?  In booking talent for that culturally significant venue, I'm afraid that the preferences of the credentialed elite are being ignored in favor of, among others, Black students who are skipping jazz studies.

Today, the newspaper publishes "The Pandemic Hits Jazz Where It Lives," titled on the Internet "Jazz Lives in Clubs. The Pandemic Is Threatening Its Future," co-authored by Russonello.  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/arts/music/jazz-clubs-coronavirus.html

"The concert world as a whole is in crisis, but perhaps no genre is as vulnerable as jazz, which depends on a fragile ecosystem of performance venues."  While the article on jazz education was all Black and white, no color, shade, tint or hue, excluding the blues, appears in this discussion of the perilous state of jazz economics.  Maybe economic survival has to be colorblind these days.  “People are always going to want to see the music.  Whether the venues survive themselves, the music is going to press on.”   

. . .

If we were to be wildly imaginative, we might consider a Marshall Plan for jazz, named for 96-year old saxophonist Marshall Allen.  This would be a much wiser and more legally sound use of taxpayer money than paying to defend the president in a defamation suit rooted in his alleged rape of a woman in the dressing room of a department store.  As one law professor said, "The question is, is it really within the scope of the law for government lawyers to defend someone accused of lying about a rape when he wasn’t even president yet?"  Clinton, for instance, used outside lawyers when he stepped into the barnyard droppings.  The Borowitz Report "reported": "In a move that many in the legal profession and laundry industry called unprecedented, Attorney General William Barr announced that the Department of Justice will start picking up Donald J. Trump's dry cleaning, effective immediately."  That's law & order for you. 

. . .

Speaking of law & order, look at perceived crimes in several administrations.  

Thursday, September 10, 2020
As we approach a crescendo of political advertising, annoying regardless of our partisan preferences, a group of political scientists offers this comfort.  "Significant theories of democratic accountability hinge on how political campaigns affect Americans’ candidate choices. We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero."  In other words, it's a waste of time and money.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/minimal-persuasive-effects-of-campaign-contact-in-general-elections-evidence-from-49-field-experiments/753665A313C4AB433DBF7110299B7433
. . .

Tonight, West End Synagogue, the home of anarchic Jews, held a program on "How Do We Explain American Jews' Fascination With Shtisel?"  This accurately reflects the mood at Palazzo di Gotthelf, where we have watched the 24-episode series twice.  Panelists were Joseph Berger, New York Times reporter and author of "The Pious Ones: The World of Hasidim and their Battles With America"; Natan Meir, Chair of the Program in Judaic Studies, Portland State University and author of "Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe"; and Rukhl Schaechter, editor of the Forverts, the only remaining Yiddish newspaper outside the Hasidic Jewish world. 

The audience for this discussion neared 500 and they heard thoughtful observations about the lives of ultra-Orthodox Jews, dramatically different from their own.  Here's the link to the recorded session.  

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/QFUjwGoqJZq6breX_AGIM53QLbKYNfytDkVdUOWKKOyc9WL1YFOx8k9IInQTyUCo.uPEbiJJsMCCIQi1d?startTime=1599779288000

Password = Shtisel910!

Friday, September 11, 2020
Today is an infamous day and it's appropriate to remember the heartfelt sentiments of Donald Trump, a native New Yorker, even as the tragedy unfolded.  When asked by a radio interviewer about the condition of his property downtown, he focussed on the real impact of the event.
"40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest — and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest.  And now it’s the tallest."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/911-memorial-trump-2001-video-world-trade-center-manhattan-new-york-a8532891.html