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14d ago
When I said that jazz was difficult, I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't easy on the ears. It's difficult in the sense that it's hard for someone accustomed to pop music to appreciate, especially if they don't have any musical training.
If it's easy on the ears, you can expose yourself to it until you passively begin to appreciate it on an unconscious level or find something that gives you a musical foothold. (I disliked violin-centric music until I heard this Julia Fischer performance of the Third Movement of the Brahms Concerto in D - it turns out that the things I disliked about a lot of violin performances weren't universal.)
And how can you say that this is Jaco's best work and not his solo album? It's obviously very good, but he's clearly a sideman here and doesn't get to show his full potential. Pretty much every track on that Jaco Pastorius exhibits a new possibility for what the bass guitar can be, particularly "Portrait of Tracy". And "Opus Pocus" is probably the only example in recorded music of menacing-sounding steel drums.
His showcase album is the best recording of him showcasing his superior potential to innovate; "Bright Size Life" is the best example of him playing superior jazz bass.
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15d ago
I have a ton of thoughts on this. First, I want to revive an ancient Reddit comment I once made in MaleFashionAdvice in answer to the question "What is Tacky?” To define good taste, we must first define poor taste:
"Tacky" find its closest synonym in "uppity" with all the racist and classist implications thereof. Tackiness is when an actor attempts to signify higher status or class through a social act (whether a verbal statement, wearing clothing, throwing a party), but fails to signify higher status and instead reveals their lower status by 'cheaping out' on some aspect of the presentation. It is in the eye of the beholder, and depends on the simultaneous judgments that the act was intended to signal high status and that it failed to do so.
I think that's a good contribution to the conversation.
Public Architecture... What counts isn’t the space, it’s what goes on there. Going to a ballgame is inherently a meaning making experience, naming the stadium for a bank doesn’t change anything. Kids who are now the age I was when the Vet was demolished were born ten years after the Phillies moved to Citizen’s Bank Park.
When looping back to the conversation about modern architecture, we have to consider that much of it was incidentally or purposefully uncomfortable to use.
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15d ago
And as I was arguing ten years ago, I argue today
How are people pulling up old comments from themselves and others like this? Perhaps that was an especially memorable blogpost, for you, but people also link to old comments from five year old culture war threads.
Having skimmed the Neely video again, he references criteria from Ken Burns' documentary that was purposefully narrow, so as to exclude fusion: swung rhythms, blues influence, and improvisation. Neely gives examples that would generally be regarded as jazz, but fail the improvisation criteria (a through-composed Ellington performance), or meet the criteria, but wouldn't generally be regarded as jazz (a hip-hop performance), but accepts it as an approximation for what distinguishes "mid-century pop" and Laufey's reinvention thereof from jazz as musical forms. I think this is reasonable.
So Neely, or I, or anyone from our generation doesn't understand why Laufey has to be jazz. People born between 1981 and 1995 aren't supposed to view genres as quality indicators. Laufey being jazz does not mean that Laufey is good. Kenny G might not be jazz, but if he is, he still sucks. But there's also a bit of bullshit to this argument. Jazz is difficult. For most people, Dixieland conjures up images of old cartoons, and the big band era brings to mind senior citizens. Prewar jazz has been reified to a degree that makes appreciation among the youth difficult if only due to its cultural connotations. Postwar jazz is too esoteric. It was created at a time when it was moving further away from mainstream musical sensibilities and toward the avant garde. Even at its most accessible, it involves harmonic structures that are quite different from most contemporary pop music, and the centerpiece is long improvisations that require close listening to fully appreciate.
(In)Accessibility takes multiple forms - almost all jazz is tonal music played with relatively soft timbres on instruments selected for consonance with each other, so a random jazz song is more likely to be inoffensive to the ear than a random song from a genre that achieves its "edginess" by way of harsh timbres and unsubtle dissonance. Anyone who can work with background music can let "Bright Size Life" be that music (and, if a reader has never heard that album, it's voir dire for Rov_Scam calling Metheny as an expert witness, as well as the best recording of the short-lived, "tortured artist" virtuoso bassist Jaco Pastorius, playing a bass guitar modified to be fretless, prior to this being commonly accepted as a valid substitute for acoustic upright bass*) - identifying the ways in which "Bright Size Life" was innovative requires prior knowledge of its context, but does "accessibility" mean "low barrier to enjoyment" or "low barrier to intellectually appreciating at the same level as an aficionado?"
*A handful of esteemed bassists had toured and occasionally recorded with bass guitars, primarily for convenience, but Pastorius was a pioneer in using bass guitars as a primarily creative choice.
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15d ago
I can't unsee the incoherence of that image, but I also didn't learn the skills that Ilzo used to call it slop.
What about the McMansions? Those (somewhat by definition, or at least by nature) frequently highlight their incoherent design features.
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15d ago
How can we help China to liberalize, to become at least more like modern Japan or South Korea in the sense that they have at least some sort of functional democracy and civil liberties for people, with a limited amount of people going to jail just because the government doesn't like them. I feel like there are probably better ways to try to bring about that outcome than pure video game style strategic considerations of resources and tariffs and so on.
Well, in the case of Japan and South Korea (and West Germany), we accomplished that by way of "benevolent" military occupation, for which hot war is a prerequisite. Have any other historical examples for us to consider?
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22d ago
I thought they were consistent with https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/, written over 10 years earlier.
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28d ago
Now, I'm given to understand, he declines to write about these matters at all. Taken in sequence, it seems to me that the trajectory isn't hard to plot.
He wrote "Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance" just four months ago. "Be Nice At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness" -> "Congratulations On Beginning To Coordinate Meanness, But Your Meanness Is Just As Shitty As Your Outgroup's Meanness" isn't much of a "trajectory," so far as I can plot, the original blogpost just had a wry title.
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1mo ago
Federal Executive: Trump's first term included him saying "take the guns first, and do due process later" and the ATF continuing to be the ATF.
States and Federal Courts of Appeal: Whatever the fuck they want.
SCOTUS: Issued Bruen, then ignored violations of Bruen.
Even in the absence of new federal gun control statutes, why should we expect gun control to significantly decrease? (With regards to your reply to Hieronymus, "legal gun owners" want to remain, you know, legal, and DIY tech is established FAFO territory controlled by the fuzz, not the populace.)
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1mo ago
Historical nugget: Philip the Arab, emperor of Rome, will always be remembered for his celebrations of the 1000 year anniversary of Rome in 248 AD.
First I've heard of him. That you described it as a "historical nugget" somewhat gives away that it's not very significant.
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1mo ago
Yeah all of them announced completion of their vaccine literally the day after the election.
I've been given links about the controversy of the data collection period.
Not really. Depends on the discount rate and the cheapness of various solutions. Basically do the geo-engineering when it makes sense from a cost benefit perspective.
A stitch in time saves nine - does anyone here know of models of what geo-engineering would be needed at different points in time?
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1mo ago
Assume that it works, why would it?
If there were no consequences of climate change until a known point in time and geo-engineering would be an immediate success, there would be no advantage to implementing geo-engineering prior to the known point in time at which consequences would occur. Do you expect geo-engineering to be an immediate success?
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1mo ago
Multiple companies announced the completion of their vaccines immediately after the election.
Which ones? Weren't Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all in Phase 3 by the time the election happened?
I'm also aware that we can basically do massive climate change on the cheap whenever we want. Sulfur dioxide seeding in the upper atmosphere or a massive sun shade in space are orders of magnitude cheaper than carbon emissions reduction.
And it'd be better to begin geoengineering now than to wait 20 years, wouldn't it?
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1mo ago
Pharma companies held back the release of their vaccines to not give any perceived benefit to Trump.
Citation? I thought the bottleneck was FDA approval, with mass production starting alongside Phase 2 success.
He didn't do much about global warming. I'm happy about that. Honestly worrying about something with consequences 20 years out feels a little silly at this point. It was nice when we had such long time horizons.
Do you smoke? (Or purposely do something else that can ruin your body on a roughly 20 year time scale.) I don't find this argument persuasive - even accepting "consequences 20 years out" at face value, "consequences 20 years out" isn't dispositive of "prevention best done now."
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2mo ago
I only read what Aftab quoted of the original article, the original being pay-walled, but those quotes and the points the author/interviewee include in his own summary are probably pretty familiar/predictable to people here: The accommodations are generally of unknown effectiveness, ineffective, or effective without respect to disability; colleges err on the side of providing accommodations, for both good and bad reasons; students try to game the system; there are (according to the author) negative consequences to making accommodations; and disability advocates allegedly responded with hostility to these things being pointed out. The possible culture war angles here are approximately all of them, but I'm mostly interested in the following:
And I’d like to take a moment to talk more about this “discipline,” given the enormous power it exerts over discussions of disability. Disability studies is not, as one might think, comprised by legal experts and neuropsychologists and the like, who, you know, study disability. Rather, this interdisciplinary field is defined by its founders and practitioners explicitly as an advocacy field. You can be a legal scholar or a research psychologist and also be in disability studies — but what qualifies you is not the object of your study, it’s the ideological flavor of your methodology and conclusions.
The paragraph (it's not clear whether the citation comes from Levinovitz or Aftab) includes a link to this 1998 paper (sci-hub pdf) - in light of the paper being 26 years old, does anyone know of current "scholars" self-identifying as deliberately-misleadingly-named activists?
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8mo ago
Search term you're looking for is the Leonard Law, passed in 1992. Not sure by how much; the California legis lookup only goes to 1992. Stanford did try the our ban is our free speech thing, but courts rejected it. The 2007 Amendment was passed with pretty clear margins, though Yee (better known for his other work) being involved doesn't encourage.
I meant I was curious about the PR and legal reasoning of Stanford announcing a "ban" they acknowledge is illegal to enforce.
The War at Stanford - The Atlantic
A few interesting things about this article:
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The author is a sophomore student-journalist, and it's really good writing, by any standard. It turns out his parents are both top journalists. Nature vs nurture (vs high-status parents faking achievements by their kids to make them look good) is ambiguous, yet again!
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One observation he makes that I hadn't seen in other reporting on campus protests, is that college admissions select for people who are "really good at looking really good," which includes strategic political posturing. This reminded me of my own experience at a high school that hyper-optimized for college admission, where I quickly became jaded by classmates openly-performative "activism." Are the elite student protestors my former classmates' gen-z counterparts? If so, how do my elite "betters" actually go on to do good things? Or, if the elite students are genuinely better than me, why are the people who are the best at looking the best mounting their (electrically conductive material, as required by this deliberately mixed metaphor) flagpole to the third rail? Or, is the sophomore student-journalist's observation true, but irrelevant, making this is just a really well-written, yet redundant, article about campus protests?
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The Stanford administration banned calls for genocide, in response to the House hearing, but acknowledged to the reporter that this is illegal, due to a California statute requiring all universities to adhere to the First Amendment, not just public universities. I'm curious what the PR and legal discussions leading to this "ban" were, and what may result from it.
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8mo ago
If "fifty Stalins" is original to Scott, I love the irony that one of his best insights is from his presentation of a viewpoint he opposes, but that is not it; it was him justifying skepticism of social scientists, by listing examples of social scientists openly stating they were ideologically motivated.
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8mo ago
Apologies. I'm rushed, but hopefully describing the basic idea and the prior idea it implicitly contrasts is a sufficient explanation of why it's worth discussing.
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8mo ago
I checked the ones with seemingly relevant titles, but no, it was a list of examples of social scientists saying they were ideologically motivated. But perhaps Scott removed it.
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8mo ago
Do you remember what belief?
Some social justice thing, the implication being that they were doing pseudoscience in bad faith.
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8mo ago
Shouldn't this username be relatively dyslexic-friendly, as the two symbols have a spacial displacement and alternate 1-1, as opposed to a random string of p and q?
I assumed it'd be least bad for a question with culture war implications to go in the culture war thread.
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8mo ago
I (possibly mis-)remember an SSC post, in which Scott linked examples of social scientists stating that the purpose of social science was to prove a such-and-such belief, but I couldn't find it. Anyone know which post this is, or have their own examples of social scientists stating this?
(I know this is a suspicious comment by the standards of the Motte, but it can't be asked at all in /r/slatestarcodex)
"Juror #2," Clint Eastwood's new film, is excellent. Watching it at home just made me doubly disappointed that it didn't get a wide theatrical release. (Not a single screening in my top-n-by-population USA city, where n is a small number.) I unreservedly recommend it being the next heavy* drama film you watch.
*Plot elements include plea bargains, homicide, alcoholism, a high-risk pregnancy, spelling "voir dire" correctly, etc...
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