READING IS, OR WAS, FUNDAMENTAL

I had a brief chat the other evening with my friend (name withheld), one of many friends I don't see much because of geography. Although I suppose geography can't really be blamed, as much as physics, time, and economics, but let's skip over that rabbit hole, on our way to a few others.
  We were talking about books, and (name withheld) was speaking with an air of childlike enthusiasm. I waffled internally for a while this morning about whether I should say that, as it could be interpreted as condescension. I decided to go ahead and take the risk, because in fact it's the core of my point. And to put things in perspective, (name withheld)'s arguably more adult than I am, since she's a mother of three and a former coroner. (I'm a father of one and I'll decline to mention what I have been formerly.)
  (Name withheld) wasn't gushing about Twilight, or whatever the current drivel is; we were talking about Russian fiction. She's a big Nabokov fan, and I've only read a sliver of his excellent work. Gogol also came up, and I can't recall Gogol ever "coming up" before in any conversation I've had anywhere. To use Thomas Alderson's phrase, (name withheld) "allowed as how" she preferred Dostoyevsky to the more celebrated Tolstoy. Me too, as I've made it all the way through a few Dostoevsky books, and only a short piece or two of the Count's fine war writing.
  Every once in a blue moon, I make a friend who likes to read. My usual m.o. is to immediately burn them out like a junkie's vein, until they're ducking my calls and taking jobs that require extensive travel. Even those friends, though, rarely talk the way (name withheld) does. Here on the pretentious east coast, when citizens talk about fiction, you hear a lot of critic words like "overrated" and "meta" being tossed around.

I MENTIONED IT ONCE, BUT I THINK I GOT AWAY WITH IT

"Realpolitik tended to be dismissed as unheroic cattle trading: the idea was to replace politics with a state of social intoxication."

--from "Blitzed-- Drugs in the Third Reich," by Norman Ohler.

  Trump is no Hitler (Hitler was better able to juggle public relations and administration), and the USA is not the Weimar Republic (our popular music is less good), but the above is yet another similarity.

I'm hoping the people who throw ein rod every time I bring up Hitler will read what I wrote and understand my point, rather than reminding me that I'm somehow insulting the memory of their ancestors by making this entirely reasonable comparison. (It seems to me that if  long dead ancestors are inclined to feel insulted, mine will be the first to find that their ears are burning gestorben wird immer.)

THE LIMITATIONS OF BELTS AND BONZONIS

  I'd hoped to quickly post some thoughts about Trump and the GOP ACA DMZ (endgame TBD; GOP VIPS in CYA mode), but Frankie Valli and his Four Horsemen have interfered. Lisa's satellite radio station could have benefitted from extreme vetting, because I didn't really need this ugly reminder that the Jersey boys had unaccountably continued their reign of Bubblegum Terror into the era of disco. (For the record, I like bubblegum; it's just that when I'm trying to think, that's an uphill battle to begin with, and the last thing I need is some Garden State merchant of Wonkaism blowing fairy dust into my failing ears. Accordingly, I've dialed up a Merzbow album. Ah, the hideous liquor of Japanese scrapings and post-modern treble shards! BROMMMM WADDA WADDA WADDA ARNNNNNNNN AIIIIIIIEEE etc.)
  Ok, ear worm shooed out the door, time to get back on point.
  This morning's Post brings a clarifying admixture of Trump news. For the record, my position here is not really about tweaking people for being against Obamacare. That's a typical, and understandable, tactic of my friends on the liberal spectrum, but let's say for argument's sake that at least some of the objection to ACA is due to its flaws. I'm happy to concede that much, if it means we can have a conversation about it.
  But my observation is this: Trump's eagerness to embrace the Paul Ryan solution, and the reaction to this from the right, is the most interesting part of the story. I interpret Trump's stance on this as evidence for what I've said many times, which is that our president isn't really about ideology or even idea; he's committed to getting good reviews. It really bugs him that Obama's early weeks were marked by action and achievement. Some would call it governing, I suppose, and even those who recall Obama as an evil Disney stepsister would have to concede that he got things done early on.  But Trump's salad days in the Oval Office have been chock full of bad reviews, and his various tantrums blaming this scapegoat and that for all of it, which has tended to generate still more criticism. The problem with the Trump-as-Evil-Genius model is that his default setting, the torrent of abusive logorrhea unmoored from facts and standardized spelling, plays better to a hateful mob than to the press; the primaries require primary colors in your rhetoric, while governance requires a kind of phony pastel sobriety. Most presidents, even the ones I don't care for, realize this long before they are given the keys.

HOT PLATE! 120 MINUTE RADIO HOUR, PILOT EPISODE

HOT PLATE! Pilot episode
Entertainment for the sharper folks.™

   
(
For a free download, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com.)

Pilot episode includes,but is not limited to, the following features.

Special guests:
The Amazing Bonzoni, chimp prognosticator. Interview.
Marty Beam, huge music fan.  Second Banana in rambling discussion about avant garde music.
Tom Alderson, writer and musician. Conversation with Karl about politics and streaking.

DEVIL'S MUSIC ADVOCATE. Avant garde music. Karl and Marty yammer about the music of Derek Bailey, Eugene Chadbourne, Evan Parker, Steve Lacy, and fellow travelers Min Xiao-Fen,  Tony Trischka and Dock Boggs. (More specific info below)

TORTUOUS POLITICAL BLATHER. Conversation with Karl and Tom Alderson. Please note: my neighbor strongly advised me not to include any political material, so if anyone asks, tell them that the political content is mostly about streaking.

GALLOWS ROAD: AN APPRECIATION

   I have a lousy sense of direction. This means that my instincts about how to get from Point A to Point B are so rarely correct as to be essentially useless, much like the recommendations of economists. Sometimes I feel that I'm going the right way, which is usually a sign that I'm dangerously off track. Other times I experience sudden anxiety that I've missed an exit, or taken the wrong one, and this anxiety has caused me to make many ruinously bad decisions. In the more innocent era before all the gadgets and gizmos moved in with us, it wasn't uncommon for me to make a driving mistake that caused me to be enormously late in meeting whichever human had unwisely expected me to meet them at some godforsaken outpost. Perhaps the best way I can illustrate my map-averse mental condition is to reveal that it was only a few years back that I was finally, and none too charitably, disabused of my long-held notion that Maryland was situated to the south of Virginia.  
  These days, I rely most of the time on GPS, which is of course also imperfect. Old band mates of mine may recall our first long-ago GPS experience, where we were told to take a left turn that would have had us driving straight into a mountain, to an almost certain death. We saw that as an amusing anomaly until later when we were trying to find a realtor's office to drop off some keys, and what should have been a quick errand slowly turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare. I actually recall saying out loud that if we were in fact where the GPS said we were, there probably wouldn't be a burro standing right next to our rental car.  
  Sometimes I use a synthesis of electronic and human advice, as when I'm driving my father to one of the 27 weekly doctor appointments required to keep his state-of-the-art cyborg exoskeleton functioning at the federally mandated levels. (Thanks, Obama.) In these situations, I depend on both GPS, and the more old-school version, DBS. This feature, which comes standard, basically involves my dad telling me we should have taken Gallows Road.

OF AFFAIRS BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC

  My knowledge of the pseudoscience of economics is limited to my grasp of the relationship between cash in my pocket and the cost of my lunch in a diner. Even in this area, my expertise is shaky, as I'm constantly thrown off course by the physics of crumpled bills and gravity, and the challenge of picking coins off the floor when they've rolled under the tables of leggy ingenues, protein-craving construction workers, oatmeal-inhaling octogenarians, and so forth. Economics is pretty complicated, I can tell you that much.
  So when I mention that I've been reading an article in Foreign Affairs, a periodical whose provocative title, I've discovered, is somewhat misleading to the uninitiated, what I'm really saying is that I've waded into a jungle without bringing the requisite grommets, carabiners, snake bite antidote, native bearers, compass, map, backup compass in case of swamp-adjacent droppage, backup map in case the first one gets covered with my blood, backup native bearers in case of Kong-related desertion, and the countless other accessories that make the screen so crowded in Tarzan films.
  In short, I've gone where the weather doesn't suit my clothes.
  But writers will do that from time to time, as it's part of the job. If you're seated at the breakfast table, lingering over your corn flakes while your offspring are successfully neutralized by their narcoleptic handheld literacy-eroders, you don't want to read an article about a guy or gal sitting there eating breakfast and reading an article. Where's the excitement in that? You want to read about thrilling adventure, overheated shipboard romance, frontier justice, barrelchested swashbuckling enthusiasts, werewolves, and the like.

TRUMP, BIEBER, AND ARMSTRONG

  James Lincoln Collier, a man whose name seemed to mark him for greatness, wrote books about jazz musicians who had pulled off something nearly unthinkable today; they were enormously popular. Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington were men whose compositional ability (either in the old-fashioned sense of writing music down for later performance, or in the jazz sense of in-the-moment melodic improvisation) sold acres of vinyl records, required an apocalypse of deforestation to produce the books written about them, and put asses in seats all over the planet. I own the bulk of their recordings, and the music I've obsessively archived on any of the three would itself dwarf the music collections of most people. (In middle school, I once saw a schoolmate's record library in his bedroom, which tragically consisted of a lone Eagles album. I think it was "Desperado.")
  Collier's books were designed not to praise these men, but rather to bury their reputations under a laundry list of deep flaws and objectionable peccadilloes.  Duke Ellington was not the American Stravinsky; he was alternatively a suave weasel, stealing much of his best music from his sidemen when he wasn't stealing their wives. Louis Armstrong wasn't a lovable genius, but was in fact a crass entertainer obsessed with applause. Benny Goodman, apparently, was not the near-saint Steve Allen portrayed in the Hollywood version; he was instead a douche bag.
  I didn't read the Armstrong book. After reading the other two, I didn't have the stomach for seeing Louis torn down. So naturally the one I didn't actually read is the one I'll be talking about today.
  I thought of the Armstrong book as I read today about Trump's recent speech. The Trump phenomenon is complicated, I believe, in spite of the efforts of his fans and detractors to convince me otherwise. It's complicated because it reveals something about Americans that we foolishly avoid seeing, and attempting to present the complicated version is dangerous if you are trying to get people to listen to you.
  Yesterday I was warned by a friend and neighbor that I should avoid politics if I want my radio show to be popular.