"'Heaven sees what the people see, Heaven hears what the people hear'/Today, Heaven’s heart feels what’s in the people’s hearts."

"This seems to mean that something happened in the past, but I can’t search for it."

Read More

"How Friedrich Engels’ Radical Lover Helped Him Father Socialism."

That's a headline. What are you picturing? I asked Meade, and he had the same misimpression I had: So Friedrich Engels was gay.

What portal of cultural change did we just pass through that, upon hearing a man had a lover, we pictured another man? It came more readily to mind that a man had a male lover than that a woman was involved in the Marx-Engels intellectual project.

But the article — at Smithsonian — doesn't portray the "radical lover" as much intellectual help. Slogging through it, I see that Mary Burns's help came in the form of house and sex work. (Engels didn't believe in marriage.) The article pushes us to perceive intellectual contribution in her connecting him to the lives of those in extreme poverty.

Had the headline suggested that kind of help, we'd surely have pictured a woman.

As it is, the headline's "father" metaphor invites us to picture sexual interaction that produces a pregnancy. Within that metaphor, Engels ought to be the female partner, since he's the one who goes through the equivalent of pregnancy and childbirth. The intellectual work product is the baby. Even though pregnancy requires man-woman sex, if we visualize Engels as the pregnant one, we expect a male partner.

I got to that article via Joe Malchow at Power Line, who gives his post a sharper headline: "Friedrich Engels Was an Entitled Jerk."

Read More

Records From My Father, Part 6: "$64,000 Jazz."

Here's the 6th selection in this series, and I've got to admit it was the silly TV-related cover that got my attention:



... but this was great. Every damn thing on the album, immensely enjoyable.  (You can download it for $7.) I will not attempt to describe this music, because, look, it has extremely extensive liner notes, including an elaborate description of the TV show, which offered the category jazz, an event that has something to do with the assembling of this collection.
If you're curious what, read this:



The track I'm least inclined to like was Erroll Garner cascading all over the piano with "Laura." It's the one track that seems corny, but I still like it. Garner is obviously committed to playing like that, and I see that it was recorded on January 11, 1951, the day before I was born. There's no singing on this album — except for that Sarah Vaughan track and a bit of Louis Armstrong on "Ain't Misbehavin'" — so if you're not familiar with the lyrics to "Laura," your enjoyment of the Garner instrumental might be heightened by listening to one of the beautiful versions of it. Here's Frank Sinatra, and here's Johnny Mathis.

My favorite track was Buck Clayton, "How Hi the Fi." I can't find it on YouTube, but it's only 89¢ to download. I don't remember ever hearing of Buck Clayton. Wikipedia says:

Buck Clayton (born Wilbur Dorsey Clayton; Parsons, Kansas, November 12, 1911 – New York City, December 8, 1991) was an American jazz trumpet player who was a leading member of Count Basie’s "Old Testament" orchestra and a leader of mainstream-oriented jam session recordings in the 1950s. His principal influence was Louis Armstrong....

From 1934 or 1935 (depending on the sources), he was a leader of the "Harlem Gentlemen" in Shanghai. His experience in the east was unique, since Clayton was discriminated against by fellow American marines who were stationed in Shanghai. On numerous accounts, he was attacked by soldiers, including an instance where bricks were thrown at him. On the contrary he was treated like an elite by the Chinese. Some of the bureaucratic social groups he was with included Chiang Kai-shek's wife Soong Mei-ling and her sister Ai-ling, who were regulars at the Canidrome. Clayton would play a number of songs that were composed by Li Jinhui, while adopting the Chinese music scale into the American scale. Li learned a great deal from the American jazz influence brought over by Clayton. A 1935 guidebook in Shanghai listed Clayton and Teddy Weatherford as the main jazz attraction at the Canidrome. He would eventually leave Shanghai before the 1937 Second Sino-Japanese War. Clayton is credited for helping to close the gap between traditional Chinese music and shidaiqu/mandopop. Li is mostly remembered in China as a casualty of the Cultural Revolution.

I wonder what my father would have thought of computers. He loved his HiFi, and built some components using Dynaco kits. I think he would have loved computers and he would have looked up these biographies and clicked through to learn about Li:

Li Jinhui (September 5, 1891 – February 15, 1967) was a composer and songwriter born in Xiangtan, Hunan, China. He is often dubbed as the "Father of Chinese popular music." He created a new musical form with shidaiqu after the fall of the Qing Dynasty-- moving away from established musical forms. Li was a very controversial figure in China. Although his music was extremely popular, the Chinese Nationalist Party attempted to ban his music, and Li was eventually silenced in death as a victim of political persecution in 1967 during the height of the Cultural Revolution....

Though Li’s early work is completely innocent and educational in content, it still met with disapprobation from some critics despite its immense popularity. This resistance may be due to the manner in which these songs were performed. Beginning in 1923, Li’s broke the taboo of not allowing women to perform on stage when he hired young girls to sing and dance in his school musical productions....

As radio became more widely accessible, so then did Li’s jazz, for which he received vicious criticism as “Yellow (or pornographic) Music.” One 1934 reviewer said of Li that he is “vulgar and depraved beyond the hope of redemption…[but] as popular as ever.” His greatest source of Jazz influence came from American Buck Clayton who worked with Li for two years. Clayton played a major role in shaping the musical scores written by Li. Li’s revolutionary Sinese jazz music dominated the nightlife scene, and it was performed at cabarets, cafes and nightclubs around southeast Asia....

Li continued to compose music the rest of his life, though he would eventually pay dearly for his fame. Classified as a founder of Yellow Music by the Communist Party of China, he became a victim of political persecution during the Cultural Revolution.

Exactly what happened? It's so sad to think even of the memories that have been lost. Googling, I find this interview with Andrew Jones, author of “Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age”:

Li Jinhui... had a bad reputation. He was supposed to be a bad guy who created the degenerate form of music that was called “yellow music.” “Yellow music” means, basically: pornographic, salacious, off-color music in Chinese. It was a music that had been banned by the Chinese Communist Party.  It was a kind of music that was seen as being decadent and colonial and unfit for Chinese ears after 1949, after the revolution.

But what I started to find out about Li Jinhui was actually pretty surprising. He was known as the founder of pop music but, in fact, he began his career as a nationalist and a patriot who was trying to modernize the Chinese language by instituting a new, standard Mandarin to knit together the patchwork of different dialects in China to create a stronger, more unified nation.  The way that he hit upon to do this was actually to write operas for children using Chinese folk tunes, western instruments and having scripts for the kids to sing in standard Chinese..... 

[T]he young girls that he had trained became the biggest stars in Chinese pop music and on Chinese screens. He, himself, became a very famous song writer and kind of pioneered this new style of modern jazz music, almost against his will or expectations....

In the early ’30s, the ruling Nationalist Party had a movement called the New Life Movement. It was basically a propaganda movement to instill proper virtues and morality in the people. The Nationalist Party at that time wanted to adopt or re-champion Confucian morality as a sort of ideological glue for the nation. So, they wanted to clamp down on Li Jinhui because they saw the music as being decadent. There was a lot of hypocrisy in that and, of course, once you ban something, it just means it does even better in the marketplace.

It seems like there should be a movie about Buck Clayton and Li Jinhui. Trying to remember my father, I stumble into their story, and it feels so terribly sad. And I've drifted so far from the starting point. This record has nothing to do with China. My father was always trying to engage me in conversations about anything. I'm sure China was one of his topics, maybe jazz in China, maybe black jazz men in the marines, and how the Chinese treated American black men, and how the Chinese treated their own jazz men. But all those conversations, which he sought so dearly, are eternally unspoken.

Read More

"We’re... baffled by Huma’s choice because women no longer need to be professionally affixed to a man to make inroads in business or politics..."

"... especially when they’ve got a résumé like hers. Two decades ago, Hillary needed Bill, that much we could understand."

What bullshit! Written by Ann Friedman in New York Magazine under the heading ("Stand by Your Man? How Huma Can Do What Hillary Couldn’t"). I don't give a damn about Huma or what happens to her, but this is unmitigated trash about Hillary. Hillary did not need Bill. Not 2 decades ago, when he was running for President, and not 4 decades ago, when she graduated from Yale Law School.

In fact, there was strong pressure on women back in 1992 and 1973, even more than now, to go it alone and not stand behind some man. Hillary knew it was a career risk to go to Arkansas with Bill, and she chose it with eyes open. Friedman is purveying some made-up social history, asserting that we "understand" it, like it's in our cultural memory. But it's completely untrue.


I was around back then, and I remember the messages to women in 1973, the year Hillary graduated from Yale Law School, which was the year I graduated from college (and I read all the feminist books of that era). By 1981, the year I graduated from law school, the message that woman had independent careers and were not destined to be helpmeets to their men was itself so old-fashioned that it wasn't even said anymore. And by 1992, the year of Hillary's sit-by-your-man interview on "60 Minutes," radical feminism — with its active distancing from patriarchy — had been tearing through the culture for years.

Such pathetic nonsense about Hillary and her place in history. And as for Huma, the notion that she could now be some pathbreaker is so stupid I don't know where it came from. Some people — who are they? — got fixated on her — why? Because she's somewhat attractive? Because she's somewhat attractive and Muslim? Because she's somewhat attractive, Muslim, and close to Hillary? I'd like those people to confess what they're so enamored about. I bet they won't, because it's nothing but stupidity.

ADDED: I suspect that Hillary and Bill are responsible for screwing up the cultural memory. So many people subordinated their feminism to Democratic Party interests during the Lewinsky scandal. It erased memory of earlier feminist progress.

Read More

How to dress your hair like Empress Plotina.

I'm loving this hair archaeology by Janet Stephens:



Here's her YouTube channel. I'm going to watch everything, but I wanted you to see this. She's figured out how to replicate the hairstyles that you see in the art of ancient Roman, using the historical tools.

Read More

"A crowbar, a candle, stale bread, dried beans, an iron spike, a drill, a stick with a cloth on the end of it, a bag of sand – and crucially, a tortoise."

The toolkit of a "secretive and highly organised group of medieval burglars" called The Banu Sasan.

"The tortoise is employed thus. The burglar has with him a flint-stone and a candle about as big as a little finger. He lights the candle and sticks it on the tortoise’s back. The tortoise is then introduced through the breach into the house, and it crawls slowly around, thereby illuminating the house and its contents."

Once the tortoise had been set up, the burglar employed his bag of sand to check for sleeping inhabitants elsewhere in the house. He would throw out handfuls of sand at intervals, and if no one stirred he entered the house.... [T]he burglar might chew noisily on some stale bread and beans to impersonate a cat eating a rat or mouse so as not alarm any sleeping people in the house.

That worked in the Middle Ages, apparently, when people practiced the art of sleeping through the maraudings of mice.

Read More

"Feeling nostalgic? Can’t get enough body hair? Want to experience the celluloid life pre-Stonewall?"

"Here’s our guide to some of the most notable (and gayest) old-school flicks from before the millennium."

These films may not be perfect. In fact, some are downright offensive by today’s standards. But they are all in some way groundbreaking for their time period and considered in sequence they provide a record of mainstream culture’s changing attitudes towards gay men.

It's nice to be in a place where these movies can be seen from a distance and even enjoyed. I was living in Greenwich Village where they were filming movie "Cruising" (circa 1980) and remember the protests. By then, the pushback was already strong, and it was embarrassing for Al Pacino to be involved in the project. Now, this weird old artifact of unhappier times can be watched for fun, apparently. I guess it depends on who you are and where you are on the that's-not-funny spectrum of human psychology, which might be gender-linked.

Read More

When Mitch Daniels took aim at Howard Zinn.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In a message sent on February 9, 2010, [Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the governor of Indiana at the time, now president of Purdue University], asked top state education officials for assurance that the works of Howard Zinn, the longtime Boston University historian and political activist, were not "in use anywhere in Indiana."

Zinn had died less than 2 weeks earlier.

"This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away," Mr. Daniels wrote, referring to Mr. Zinn. "The obits and commentaries mentioned his book 'A People's History of the United States' is the 'textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.' It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. Can someone assure me that is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?"

It seems low to kick the man just when he dies, but Daniels admits to picking up the information about the "execrable" book from the obituaries, which makes the timing less mean and just ignorant.
Who didn't know about "A People's History of the United States"? And it sounds so lame to demand that "someone" "assure" him that it's not being used "anywhere in Indiana." Why didn't he already know how history is taught in Indiana schools? Instead of going hysterical about banishing a book he just heard about, why wasn't he already taking care to ensure that the children of Indiana were receiving sound, valuable reading materials in their history classes?

If there's one thing that disgusts me, it's compelling children to spend their days trapped in school buildings and then not serving their best interests. Zinn tried to do what — in his view — he deemed worthy, which was to supply the counter-story to conventional high-school-level American history. It was up to the education professionals and the politicians who supplied them with their endless flow of vulnerable little clients to perform what was and is a moral duty to give them an excellent education, in history and everything else. Belatedly railing about Zinn is a pathetic revelation of how miserably these people abused children.

I really don't give a damn about how this idiotic material is used against Daniels in his role as president of Purdue. The old politico can fend for himself. What's important is that those with a duty to the children failed — as they fail in all the other states and have failed for a long, long time.

Read More