Damn America

So the truth of music history is this.  We live in the times of the music we have studied.  Also we live in the times in which the music lives.  (the music lives in the time in which is it composed)  The disparity between when the music is composed and when it is recognized, understood, and felt is the void.  What is the void?  The void is the black hole between times of Enlightment.  The Dark Ages.  In America music history is waiting to be discovered.  The 20th Century, the 1900's have cemented themselves as important as any period in music history, and yet they are unstudied.  On a miniscule level they have been experienced, and yet those who experienced them are not vocal.  They are not supportive.  They are are not viable.  It would seem recent history forgets itself quickly, just as sleep deprives short term memories from becoming long term memories.  The Viet Nam era, its strife and loss, are a fleeting moment in American history.  How is this possible?  Fifty years ago, war raging, rampant political unrest is forgotten.  Today all of it is exactly the same, rebranded, re-booted, recast into selfish, faggot, extremist fodder.  Damn. 

The Business of War

Nobody much has the stomach for my blog entries.  I guess I could be considered to be an asshole, but I'm not.  Moving back home, where we all well know you can't go, a new set of problems beset me.  Upon careful scrutiny this new set of problems are not new at all.  They are the same problems I had years ago growing up in this same place.  The people are the same, hence the problems are the same.  The problems really should be considered obstacles, obstacles of others' short-sighted views.  God and our friends tell us never to worry about what other people think of us.  I am positive Joel Osteen would preach the same thing.  Therapy.  Who cares what others think of us?  Wake up and smell the coffee.  What is society other than a group of human beings who must work together?  There are few situations in which human beings operate autonomously.  Perhaps Jeff Bezos began this way sitting in a lonely garage brokering sales to internet customers.  Eventually in a plural society we must work together.  It is a small world, and that is true.  You must worry about what other think about you if you want any friends.  Possibly there was a time or a situation when human beings acted civilly and with Christian faith.  Those times in America are long gone so it would seem.  Perhaps still you can be a "nice guy" and get along.  I have changed my opinion about this.  (My left ear now is screaming from tinnitus.  The 82nd Airborne is readying for deployment, and their aircraft fly just above the treeline over our yard)  Also their railhead at the  Honeycutt Marshalling Yard is in full swing.  The army has Gen-Set locomotives which shut themselves down when not in use.  That is not the protocol here.  When the military are readying for deployment they spend countless days and nights loading munition trains at Fort Bragg.  We are so fortunate that the army saw fit to bury part of their mainline underneath Reilly Road.  Rumor is they have been building loading ramps that go directly underground to load munitions on these trains.  Anyone familiar with the Taos Hum knows what that creates.  Hmmmmmm.  Put an AC locomotive underneath the ground and use it as a switcher, and what you get is not only hum sounds but leaking electricity.  The Taos Hum was a complex entity, and it took me six months to unravel its source.  I have written about it before.  The company responsible for the Taos Hum was General Electric.  The source of my tinnitus is both aircraft and trains, the only things capable of producing infrasound and ultrasound at such a great volume level it causes the lost frequencies in your ears to ring.  My left ear is a good litmus test for train and plane activity.  While I don't like it, it is not the most destructive force in my life.  There are others.  While I am worrying about what other people think about me and trying to mitigate the staunch LGBT movement surrounding me, the United States military, the FBI, private corporations, and government politicians are making my life a living hell.  How you may ask?  How is it possible that these outside forces are impactful on my state of psychological health?  Mostly it is because of the military and their protocol for war.  They train very close by to murder our enemies.  They practice killing in many ways.  With that training comes a presence of defense contractors, intelligence agencies, military officials of high rank, and Washingtonian politicians.  Fort Bragg has become in the last decade a very high profile installation.  If one looks at a Google map you will see the plethora of underground installations recently built at Fort Bragg.  You will not see the portion of their mainline railroad track that is disguised in a tunnel underneath Reilly road.  We live in the Age of Electricity.  It has been predicted by many.  Past president Bill Clinton largely was responsible for this era.  He auctioned off microwave frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum formerly that had been classified as dangerous to human beings.  With one fell swoop of his presidential quill the telecommunications industry was revolutionized.  Once America had to break up the telephone company into "Baby Bells" to avoid a massive corporate monopoly.  Today this is exactly what we have again.  Since George W. Bush repealed most regulatory legislation governing corporate America's economic mechanism has morphed into an undecipherable, complex, and unfair system for producing capital.  It favors the rich.  Along with this cancerous economic system we systematically have miseducated our youth.  I am coining a word here, but it is true.  America purposely has stymied the intellect of her younger generation to empower the rich all ready in power.  We have so many problems all ready, but the real problem has become the rich ruling class are proving themselves to be evil doers.  They are dropping like flies around us.  I can handle intellectual obstacles, because I enjoy solving problems.  What an American cannot mitigate is torture.  The poisoning of well and ground water at Camp Lejune is well documented.  A dozen claims a week still are being processed of illness, death, and pain created by the Marine Corp's polluting of the ground water near Jacksonville, NC.  If our own military has been responsible for such deeds, killing innocent American citizens, then it should become clear against what we are up.  The needs of the United States military, her personnel, governance, and support are more important than the American people they are supposed to protect.  This is a difficult pill to swallow, but not if you live in Fayettenam.  The defense industry and our military are not concerned with our well being.  They are concerned with themselves.  The same people about who I worry what they think of me will disagree, because they are the same people.  I am surrounded by selfish boobs who have no philosophy of life, no conscience, and no awareness of human reality.  I am self indulgent enough to have an emotional lapse that is allowing me to grovel in self pity.  While I generally am not lonely or needy of human companionship, when life around you becomes so unbearable to remain human one must acknowledge reality.  My reality is I have few friends.  What once were Facebook friends mostly have proven they have lost their own minds.  Truly if I do look at my own situation, it doesn't hold much water.  It is not often I get down about it.  Others say every time you make plans God laughs.  I disagree.  You plan your work and work your plan, and yet my own plan has become disguised.  I am too busy fighting for my own survival against my own environment.  The war zone of Fayettenam is real, and the covert fighting force of the defense industry and the United States military and its governance do not care about average people.  They are too busy inciting war to keep themselves in business. 

Artistry in Rhythm

Nothing is more insipid than Emanuel Ax playing Brahms.  On the other hand nothing is more inspiring than Alfred Brendel playing Beethoven.  That is the way music is it would seem.  Keith Jarrett recording "The Koln Concert," not jazz, and yet it is the most selling solo jazz piano recording of all time.  It is because it is not jazz.  I listened to "Tapestry" the other day.  It is a lovely recording, and it became clear to me as I listened to it what popular music is.  There is so much disparity about these two words.  Popular Music.  In a nutshell there is much more to its definition.  Put simply "pop" music is a rhythm style forged from the guitar which serves a particular musical and emotional need for the populace.  It accomplishes this goal in several ways.  One, as jazz players realized early on,  "pop" tunes are simple melodies that transcend  hearsay.  Pop is a morphing of words, story, melody, harmony, and orchestration that combine into an effective transcendent vehicle for sensory enjoyment.  Carol King is not the most accomplished singer, but her songs are honest as are her performances.  They achieve her point and convey that point to her listening audience.  Thus the definition of Popular Music is credible in this discussion.  Why is Emanuel Ax playing Brahms not appealing to me?  The answer is the same reason why Keith Jarrett's "Koln Concert" is not appealing to me.  The emotional and aesthetic expression do not reach me.  To enjoy these performances you must have a similarity of soul.  What the musicians are saying in their performances must resonate with your personal experiences.  It is possible to learn to feel what they are expressing in time if one so chooses.  Alfred Brendel playing Beethoven moves me.  His interpretation rises above Beethoven's notes and captures a pure expression of soul and feeling.  It is marvelous.  How can you teach that?  If you work on a cruise ship playing piano, the Musical Director is all anxious that his pianist can play "colla voce."  Colla voce is an Italian musical term which instructs the pianist to follow the solo vocal performance.  The pianist must follow the timing, phrasing, and dynamics of the vocalists performance.  This is a common requirement for pianists, and any pianist with a traditional academic education will have some experience playing colla voce.  The key is HOW does one do this?  Do you watch the vocalist?  Obviously you listen to them, because that is a basic requirement of good musicianship.  Listening while performing on one's instrument may be the best advice one can get, especially in jazz music.  It does not apply to all musical situations and especially today.  So called musicians are so poorly trained and amateur many of the rules of professional music do not apply.  Try your first cruise ship gig playing with a track.  The most unpleasant and not enjoyable gigs are ones where the musicians do not listen to one another and attempt to play together.  If a song is going to be successful on the pop charts, you better believe that the musicians are on the same page musically speaking.  They are going to "hit" in the same place, which means the interpret the time or the groove the same way.  In music you can play in front of, behind, and in the middle of the beat.  Doing so creates tension in the music that often is desirable.  It is interesting that the "pop" groove as I have come to understand it uses a permutation of this formula.  The rhythm tracks stretch forward and backward so to leave space in the middle for the vocal.  Jazz music does not do this, because the transparent nature of acoustic drums and bass do not get in the way of the piano sound.  The piano sound itself is very unique in that it too is transparent in some ways.  Ironically the "pop" groove has infiltrated the jazz scene and often when you are hearing a so-called jazz song the bass and drums actually are playing what I call the "Pop" groove.  It does not interest me really, because jazz did not originate with this rhythmic feel.  In most successful jazz all the players in the group hit in the same place.  Therefore it swings.  Most cruise ship bands don't swing, and thus they play the "pop" groove by default without really knowing it.  Try playing along with this rhythmic accompaniment and you will realize you must change your rhythmic and technical approach to the piano.  You must play like Leon Russell, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, or the rest of the pop players.  Physically they approach the piano in a way very different from what is taught in either classical or jazz technique.  In ways it is an abandonment of the principles of effective piano playing, because the fingers strike the keys in a seeming uncontrolled many.  Interestingly there are varying approaches to the "pop" piano technique, and I witnessed most of them while accompanying Guest Entertainers on cruise ships.  You can stab the key with outstretched and stiff fingers.  You can swipe at the keys with limp noodles.  You can play penguin style like Stevie Wonder and hang your fingers over the keyboard as so to be very close to the keyboard.  This is a necessity if you can't see the keyboard, so perhaps being blind was one root of the pop piano style.  Certainly Ray Charles exploited this approach physically playing from side to side with his arms.  Leon Russell plays between his hands in an extremely small rhythmic pocket  also undulating from side to side.  It could be described as the difference between playing single stroke or double stroke with a drum stick.  Try tapping on a snare drum with a stick with only one hand over and over.  Then try doing the same thing but alternating from hand to hand.  Truly this is the difference in the "pop" feel.  The pop feel alternates, and it often is an alternation between the feet and the hands.  It is common for the notes to swing a little bit between very much like a basic strumming pattern on the acoustic guitar.  If you loosen your wrist, the notes will swing a little bit between your down and up strokes.  If the feel solely can be created with this motion and not an emotion, it has the potential to be devoid of passion.  It could have no real feeling at all as does most superficial pop music today performed by con artists.  Music that should be appreciated should have feeling, an emotional expression that shapes the sound and rhythm.  Igor Stravinsky might disagree, because he has said that music itself has no capability to express emotion on its own.  Discuss.  Without feeling or passion art will not mean much, and if that passion is not somehow related to the reality in which we live, it will be more nondescript.  If artists cannot discern their reality and thus express an opinion about it thought music, then the man has won. 

The Prick, the Thistle, and the Wardrube.

There is an artistic community in Fayetteville, and there is no better symbol of it than the Fayetteville Symphony Orchestra.  Begun in the living room of the Grimes family on Skye Drive, Harlan Deno and his band of merry violins began an orchestra that with the aid of old school fortunes has developed into a stellar musical performing group.  Luckily there is a well established lineage in orchestra music.  I have been lucky to have studied it.  At different times there have been other notable artistic venues in Fayetteville.  There is the Cape Fear Regional Theater begun by Bo Thorp and Lee Yopp.  There is Sweet Tea and Shakespeare, and there is the Gilbert Theater.  I have but one thing to say about theater in general.  It is a lost art.  Why is it a lost art?  It is a lost art, because you shouldn't parody your soul.  Instead you should understand and nurture your soul.  American theater today is nothing more than a drag show, even if it doesn't want to be.  Even if the shows are straight the ill effects of homosexuality taint the soul of theater.  That is because you shouldn't parody your own soul.  Do we really want to see Billy Bigalo in drag?  No.  Is "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" a viable Broadway show?  Yes, but it understands itself.  If you don't understand heterosexuality and you misplay it, it is insipid.  America's sexuality today is insipid, because everyone is confused.  We are too busy questioning our genitalia rather than following our innate passions.  If you can't play the play straight, then it doesn't make sense.  The cruise industry is a major player in the corruption of American theater.  In one particular show the female production singer belts, "I am the Man of La Mancha."  No she isn't, and it doesn't make sense for her to sing that.  Just like anything is jazz, anything goes in theater.  That is so far from the truth.  The soul of theater is sexuality, and to it must be adhered.  I have seen so many shows in Fayetteville which brazenly disregard this precept.  I have seen reputable Broadway shows unknowingly brought down by callus and selfish homosexuality.  Theatre in its purest sense doesn't go both ways.  It can go the way of Hedwig, and when it does it can be successful.  You can't make a drag show of everything, especially Carousel.  It happens often.  I was reading about T.S. Elliot, and it was no surprise that while writing his series of children's books he disliked sexuality in general.  He felt children should not have to grow up.  His work reflects that sentiment, and to me it is insipid watching adults dress up in animal costumes and make believe.  Why would anyone pay to see this?  Why would anyone pay to watch two adult men actors talk on stage?  I mean talk in the most boring, monotone, meaningless manner imaginable in the sake of acting and theater.  "Trumbo" was a resounding failure, and no one in Fayetteville will say it.  Instead they sell season tickets, so that the quality of the production is shielded from harm.  If the show is no good it doesn't matter.  All ready it is bought and paid for.  "Trumbo" was the most insulting play ever I have seen, because the essence of acting was absent.  It seems America is loosing touch with the craft of acting.  It is not a surprise.  Without sexuality, passion, and emotion talk is cheap and boring.  Certainly we should not pay $30.00 to hear two people talk on stage about nothing much.  We were patrons of a recent show in Fayetteville, and it bore no resemblance to anything theatrical.  There were no sets.  There were no props.  There was no lighting.  Most of all there was no acting.  They didn't know how to act, and above all they didn't know what acting was.  It was a mockery of theater, and yet the people clapped.  They clapped because their "people" were in the show.  That is not good enough.  I watched this void of sexuality, its androgynous limp-wristed attempt at theater and was stymied.  Adults dressed as animals saying words with no meaning.  Talk about self-indulgent.  Theater deserves more than this, and now that theater has become jazz it is time to take a moment to review the vehicle which theater is.  It is not mindless, sexless, fairy tales hiding from reality.  It is human reality in this world, not Narnia.  Please Mr. Elliot, go back to your ivory tower and jump off. 

Ensuing War

Luckily last night when I was surfing through Direct TV's plethora of useless channels, I happened upon "Fosse."  I don't remember which network on which it was, but I was delighted to watch any television programming that uses art as a subject.  I was familiar with Bob Fosse.  I remembered he created "Jazz Hands."  He was a prominent Broadway choreographer.  Sometimes I get him confused with Bob Mackie.  While working for the cruise lines I had to play music for Sweet Charity, Cabaret, and other popular Broadway musicals.  Since then I have developed a deeper interest in dance.  Be careful not to tell anyone this, because where I live only the United States military is important.  They are omni-important, because their dollars support most of the community of Fayetteville.  Fayettevillians have been thriving from spent military dollars since the inception of Fort Bragg.  If those military dollars evaporate into the midst of Desert Storm, many businesses will fail.  It is a bit of a drag that a city derives its soul from the practice of war.  When I moved to Columbus, Ohio after several years I realized the difference.  In Columbus there was no war!  There was no mention of war or impending war.  The city functioned well with no military activity whatsoever.  It was glorious.  Instead art was prevalent.  Don't get me wrong.  There is art in Fayettenam.  There is a die hard artistic community which thrives despite Fort Bragg.  Perhaps others more easily can ignore the ramifications of the practice of war.  I cannot.  I, in my personal consciousness, do not want to entertain the thought of war at any time, and yet I do.  I dream lucid dreams of living during war.  I wake to scenarios having to save myself from demise of all kinds.  I solve complex situations living during war perhaps purely as visceral stimulation to my intellect-starved brain.  Certainly television offers no visionary or artistic content.  "Fosse" is an abnormality, or we have the wrong service provider.  Perhaps "On Demand" or streaming is the wave of the future for the viewing of content.  Both my mother and I are from the old school.  We don't want to spend time programming our own prime time line up, not that we watch television during prime time anyway.  I don't.  Why would I?  I used to enjoy late night television until its content evaporated.  When Letterman, Craig Ferguson and Kilborn disappeared from late night TV, its fate was sealed.  Now we have nothing more than insulting, insipid, insidious uncle Tomming.  The changes in American culture are stark, drastic, and real.  We have regressed as a nation in every way possible.  We have become a culture of trash, white trash, trailer trash, and LGBT trash.  We seek nothing other than to satisfy our own selfish desires mistakenly represented as progress.  "Uh, I look in the mirror, and I don't know what sex I am."  How is your day going to end up?  With the myriad of problems facing humanity, this is one of them.  I have to reinforce my innate sexuality rather than having it reciprocated in society.  How is it that God's plan, God's creations have been so drastically altered?  We, mere humans, feel we have the knowledge and power to act as our on God?  It is a shite state of affairs.  I don't want ever to think about war, and yet I am prepared.  Subconsciously my brain receives stimulation from the military industrial complex, and instead of creating art I try to figure out how to survive in war torn America.  It is coming. 

The Government Which Kills Its People

As I sit in my bedroom I cannot enjoy music.  There is too much diesel knock.  My left ear is ringing from tinnitus, incidentally which is caused by low frequency sound waves.  This occurs only if you all ready have hearing loss in your ears.  For whatever reason the lost frequencies "ring" with the sound of tinnitus.  No one wants you to know that, especially GE.  Most low frequency pollution is caused by transportation of people and freight.  Planes and trains.  Not only do my ears ring from this pollution, I have diesel knock in the air in my room.  I can hear the sound of the diesel engine with my ears.  I can feel its vibration on my skin.  Consequently we are going to spend two thousand dollars insulating the upstairs of our house for low frequency noise.  The common wall for both upstairs bedrooms also is a wall for our garage attic which is untreated.  There is a huge open cavity, the attic, which has no insulation.  It is a garage.  It is hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  That air abuts this common wall of both upstairs bedrooms which for the most part is untreated.  It partially is treated with rock wool and blackboard from l962.  That is all, and it is very ineffective for insulating these bedrooms for temperature and low frequency vibration from diesel trains and military aircraft.  We are going to spend two thousand dollars to treat it.  This is after having siding and double pane windows installed.  It will make a difference.  My father, before he died, used to say, "I don't want to go into that room.  I may be dead in the morning."  It didn't used to be a problem, before AC Traction widely was implemented both by CSX-T and now Norfolk Southern.  N/S refused to buy AC locomotives at first.  Now as their fleet ages they are rebuilding their C40-9W's with alternating current traction motors.  Consequently large invasive inverters are installed and a milieu of electrical processing in an auxiliary cab.  Mobile AC generators capable of producing 4,400 horsepower per locomotive.  They are ambulant.  Constantly they move under the cloak of anonymity through our communities, our hillsides, and our cities.  They are omnipresent, and yet they are unregulated just like our airlines.  The FAA and the FRA have a cozy relationship with the industries they are meant to govern.  Hence not much regulation occurs.  Instead a lot of bribes are offered in the way of lobbying.  Gifts.  The American people suffer.  The demise of the United States is occurring at the behest of Washington, and they do not care.  They are not concerned with their reckoning in the afterlife.  Only they are concerned with their wealth now.  Trump.  These are the evils against which Jesus preached.  It would be a shame to see the world end in our lifetimes, but no one seems to care in Washington.  Scores of Trump operatives have been discovered, indicted, tried, and convicted, and the Mueller Report is a hoax.  I can't listen to it anymore, a pathological liar who is our president.  Nancy Pelosi won't impeach.  Two more years of decline and eventual anarchy we have to which to look forward.  We are spending two thousand dollars insulating our upstairs, so that the unregulated rail freight industry serving America's military industrial complex will decrease its presence in our lives.  It is a token.  Even with this treatment the amount of electricity in our environment is toxic.  Our batteries inexplicably run down.  The power grid is tamped down, and our lights are dim.  Our WiFi network drops out, and often there is a standing wave in our home.  I can't tell if it is acoustic or electromagnetic, because sound and electricity behave in similar ways.  Since the Marines came to Fort Bragg to practice heavy artillery an omnipresent low frequency wave has been in our home.  It is variable and responds to sound.  If I raise my voice, yell at it, strike an enlightening thought or emotion, or anything else that should be private it responds by changing its frequency.  A few years Amanda Dolasinsky wrote in article in the Fayetteville Observer about the Army's new targeting system.  It is a mobile radar system which helps gunners target their shells.  Specifically she wrote that after the round is fired the system emits sound waves.  She wrote "sound waves," not electromagnetic waves.  Radar is a standing electromagnetic wave.  When I e-mailed her and asked her if this was a mistake, she didn't respond.  We can assume she was accurate, and that our defense industry is using dangerous infrasound in its products.  The companies that built America like GE and the companies which are supposed to protect us instead are lowering our quality of life.  I would go as far as to say they are killing us.  I have friends that agree the food industry slowly has been killing us as well.  Who is responsible for discovering and prosecuting this activity? 

The Space Farce

Can we please dispense with the dribble?  Gump's acting Secretary of Defense, a Boeing operative, who all ready is in hot water for killing hundreds of innocent civilians suggests the United States Air Force is the appropriate arm of our armed services to manage a newly sanctioned "Space Force."  Space Farce more likely.  We went through this with Ronny.  "Star Wars."  Luckily it became a string of hit movies instead of yet another HAARP.  Open up a sewer and toss America's dollars into the collar, just holler, puking up dollars.  Who more appropriate to suggest an additional pork barrel in addition to the dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security?  W's only response to 9/11 was a new government agency devoted to national security.  As the twin towers were bombed he continued to read to a class of school children.  Cheney masterminded is ascent to power in this moment.  The mere suggestions that socialism was represented by former president Obama.  America purely is a socialist entity.  Our government is a rampantly out-of-control bourgeoisie corporate owning and regulating facade of capitalism.  There is no free market.  The tax payers dollars subsidize this bourgeoisie menagerie, the federal government, the "Swamp," Congress, and the White House.  Gump is the most contemptuous, narcissistic, dishonest president in recent history and still the hillbillies holler for white supremacy.  Our president is the guiding force for renewed violence and racism in America, and yet Ms. Pelosi won't impeach.  He incites murderous violence with his flippant words and takes no responsibility.  The very definition of Beelzebub, agent orange is reveling in his exoneration.  The Mueller report vindicating his regime of collusion but not.  Everyone close to him in his franchise has been indicted, convicted, and imprisoned.  Clearly he has shown his true strength, letting his hired guns take his fall.  Vindication is America's largest joke.  Pelosi won't impeach.  Space Farce, a Boeing operative acting as the Secretary of Defense masterminding his company's resurgence after killing hundreds of innocent civilians with the dropping of a few bits.  Regulating themselves into a pickle with the FAA and FRA sucking their teats like hungry calves, calves that become steer with castrated testicles foraging shit out of the ruts.  Socialism!?  We are a socialist nation, a socialist economy, a socialist entity.  Those offensive bourgeoisie Washingtonians shouting, "Socialism!"  Let's create an entire new arm of the United States military and let Boeing equip it with no bid contracts offered up by Cheney and Rumsfeld.  We've been through this before. 

Keith Jarrett and Pop Swing Time

I would tell Keith Jarrett to sit down.  Upon reflecting on the concept of swing rhythm or rather swing "feeling,"  modern musicians who knows nothing about either would tell me to sit down.  Playing with a computer, a synced track, or anything produced in a studio by others is not being in a band.  It is not being a musician.  I turn on late night TV, I try to watch a musical guest, and I turn the channel..... to more commercials.  There are more drug commercials on the evening national news than there is news.  I would tell Keith Jarrett to sit down.  Upon watching one of his live DVD's of the standards tour with Gary Peacock and Jack Dejohnette, I was trying to wrap my head around Keith's presentation.  Jazz is not popular.  It never has been.  It was and is an underground music.  Mr. Marsalis has tried to take jazz "to the people" by abandoning swing rhythm and replacing it with pop rhythm.  Again modern performers would tell me to sit down.  What's the difference they say?  No one knows.  "Anything is jazz," they would say.  Not so.  Swing feel and pop rhythm or style are not the same.  The only similarity between them is that pop style  attempts to swing between its quarter notes.  It is a drunken lope rather than a swing feel, and it can be created with a pick rather than with a real emotional feeling.  This is how many a name band made their money, faking it with this rhythmic concept.  I would tell Keith Jarrett to sit down, because....  Bueller?  Anyone?  Does anyone think that Mr. Jarrett's physical contortions are natural?  Or are they an act?  No other jazz pianists I know of dance while they play, not that we could call his movement dance.  He just moves around, and because of this movement his lines lack swing feel.  I was watching this trio, Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack Dejohnette trying to get their style.  Mr. Dejohnette plays pretty rigid.  He does not move his body very much to show internalization of the time or feel.  His back is straight and he plays with his wrists.  Then again there is so much movement in Mr. Jarrett's performance, there is enough.  With all of that movement, a stiff approach could be appropriate.  I guess they figured it out.  That trio has their own rhythmic concept, and it has worked for them.  Jazz is not popular music, but they have remained in the mainstream as long as they have been playing.  I hear different cuts from those standard recordings, and often I hear Keith hit his target.  After lots of searching through classical approach, improvisation, and soul he will find the center of a tune.  He will play a truly authentic phrase that purely is jazz.  That is something to which I want to listen, a master.  Then I bought the DVD.  I had to listen through the distraction of his movement.  I thought does this augment this performance?  My conclusion was no.  It appeared to me that he is missing the little finger on his left hand.  That is a set back in piano playing.  I wanted to hear his piano playing, his lines, his ideas, and his expression, but all of this was upstaged by this strange movement.  As I continued to watch these three great musicians play together, I realized that how they are playing is not really swing in nature.  None of these three jazz musicians were articulating the time at the same place.  Each musician had his own idea of where the time was, hence there were three different interpretations of where the time was.  They were not hitting together.  By definition how could this concept swing?  They are playing despite one another or against one another.  That traditional swing feeling that is achieved by playing together in time was absent for the most part.  It was a dialog of jazz ideas but not played in time together as a trio.  It reminded me or "pop."  Pop does the same thing.  It only is a framework, a set of fence posts in between which the musicians play, often not together.  There is no possible way to achieve a swing feeling playing this way, because swing is ensemble music.  In ensemble music you must play together.  I hear Keith searching for the answer, and often he gets it.  I only could think you are only making it more difficult for yourself by creating an undulating cloud in which to play.  How will anyone know if you ever play together, because you are trying to hard to disguise the traditional body language that suggests ensemble playing.  Perhaps it is a duality.  Mr. Jarrett wants the freedom of expression not to be tethered to the piano bench.  The rules of piano realization are concrete, and he is breaking them.  It should be no surprise that they don't swing. 

Saudi Justice

We are traveling to Boone, NC next weekend for my aunt's memorial service.  I am surrounded by loss.  It feels like it, those
feelings from high school that are infused with passion for music and love.  They can become oppressive, and that is when you learn to turn them off.  They can pull you right into the grave.  You need to feel what you feel, and much of that is what is around you. When it becomes detrimental, you have to push your head up out of the sand and follow your own path.  It is not chosen with you feelings.  Feelings have nothing to do with it.  It has been four days of music and feeling and grief and sorrow.  I have enjoyed the music, but it is laced with melancholy.  My father has passed, and we miss his music.  That is of what it reminds us, at least my mother.  I am a child again being whisked around to her functions.  I benefit from them, but is exposes an insurmountable scenario.  She wants me to be caught up in the rapture of the local music scene again.  I don't want it.  When I lived in this house, I was not yet a proficient trumpeter.  The dynamics of this home, while it is comfortable in which to live, is not ideal for the practicing of trumpet.  Throughout college I suffered from this, bad acoustics for trumpet.  The practice rooms in Hill Hall were cinder block and tile.  The acoustics were not good.  My ears are to sensitive for bad sounds.  Bad acoustics are created by the machine, and once again I am going to rage against the machine.  The Marines.  Whence it comes I do not know.  The military's  targeting system.  Those expensive war helicopters.  Underground ammo dumps and loading terminals.  The son-of-a-bitch CSX-T engineer who spends our entire weekend putting around in his two stroke turbo charged AC traction equipped locomotive blowing the most menacing sounding and depressing horn.  All weekend, back and forth and all around "Da Ville" this ignorant, hillbilly, Trump supporter destroys the quality of life for the entire city.  He is not regulated.  "CSX-T failed to respond to our phone calls or E-Mails," say the local news networks.  They are beyond regulation, a metaphor for America's trusts which became to powerful and destroyed the lives of native Americans.  Your spread happens to be in the way of the great iron horse, and its gone.  Nothing has changed.   No one can say anything to this redneck, vagabond, shoe.  When your government fails to protect you, local, state, and federal prosecutors are afraid for their livelihoods, and the FRA and EPA are run by Trump goons, what is our public recourse.  When our friends and neighbors continue to die at an accelerated pace, cancer thrives, and diseases from are not so distant past are resurrected in epidemics.  What kind of society are we?  How is justice served?  Ask the Saudies. 

Phantasy Land

I am bored and listless, but don't tell anyone.  The suggestions will roll in like a plague, most of them insulting and patronizing.  I won't understand the "Baby Boomers," and I don't want to.  They are the most provided for generation.  When you look at the "Boomers," you see America who provided for her people, because these people were in control.  They could ensure their own security.  America no longer has that.  Without dredging up the oft heard story about America's financial inequality, "Them that have gets," in the immortal words of one of America's most influential composers.  We don't remember him or any of the special artists who shaped American culture.  Today as soon as you die you drop off the map.  Who is responsible for carrying the torches of American heroes and artists?  The recording industry for one, but contrary to popular belief, television largely has shaped American culture.  Pundits will disagree.  Watch any prime time late night television talk show, and you will see why.  There is no talent.  When there is talent the maturity level is so low the programming  is insulting.  Jimmy Falon is a talented host, but the network uses one percent of it.  His style is like a sheepish child who kowtows to the guests.  Unlike Conan O'Brien who challenges his guests, Jimmy doesn't want to upset the status quo, which has become mindless.  Once successful television was anti-establishment.  It stretched the boundaries of human sensibility and questioned our government.  Today with the repeal of antitrust legislation and the elimination of corporate oversight, America has become on big company with very little talent.  It's about money, and who gets it.  The high ups get it, and like everything in America once meaningful methods and products have been devalued.  Music is the best example.  One the music industry in America surpassed the earnings of Hollywood.  It was a massive, throbbing, viable force who capitalized on anti-establishment sentiments.  Who wants to be governed by Mitch McConnell?  Who wants a slobbering, selfish, old man in control of your country?  If you die in America today, forget it man.  You're dead, and it will be a hundred years before they discover your artistry.  During Black History Month a lot of criticism was floating around about "Black Face."  Many do not know that Sammy Davis Jr. donned blackface during his career as an entertainer.  There was a malicious and derisive force which created a propaganda campaign against African Americans after the civil war.  The American South continued to fight the civil war after it was over.  It would seem those are some racist motherfuckers.  There was a smear campaign against African-Americans, and it used caricatured images to wage it.  They indeed were ugly, insulting, and egregious.  Not everyone in the entertainment industry born of minstrel blood meant harm with their use of these images.  The proof of that statement lies on modern television.  Television is littered with stereotypical images, but no one will realize.  Times have changed in America, but I don't enjoy a drummer on late night TV who looks like a "Broke Back Mountain" rancher.  This must be part of a new concept developed for television by that big corporation.  They are trying to be LGBT friendly from the amount of transgender publicity floating around.  Whether you like it or not, and I know this is mean-spirited, but Bruce Jenner today is nothing more than a burnt out, cross dressing fag.  You can glam it up all you want, paint a rosy picture, and try to get ratings, but they truth is the truth.  He was not interesting as an aging athlete, so he bends God's truths for his own good.  It is a ploy, and I do not enjoy watching grown men dress in drag.  Drag shows for entertainment purposes are another thing all together.  Why?  The answer is because there is talent involved.  Cross dressing is not enough to earn money, and it shouldn't be.  What are these images of which I speak?  Is anyone looking?  Are the Uncle Tom images scattered on television not conspicuous to anyone?  Buckwheat?  "Oh, he is a lovable little kid."  That couldn't be racially insulting playing down his intelligence for a warm sentiment?  Or could it?  I never have seen African-Americans on TV today work so hard for an image.  We have been through it before, and I am old enough to remember.  When Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, STAX records changed.  Their once formative blending of races in their music studio came to an abrupt halt.  The killing of MLK was a blow to America's burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.  STAX responded.  No longer did they continue to produce racially mixed soul music.  Instead they created images often made fun of in what are called "Blaxpolitation" films.  I find nothing satirical, insulting, or racist in these films.  Simply characters emerged who would not bow down to a racist nation.  They became strong, vengeful, and aggressive.  At the same time they became heroes of an oppressed faction in racist America.  I enjoyed the power of the 1970's, and never did I see it, until I watched a Freddie Hubbard performance during this decade.  It was remarkable the power of his band, and they were not rock.  The energy that exuded from this ensemble with their African rhythms and modal harmony was as powerful as a Jimmi Hendrix concert.  George Cables ripped the lid off of his Rhodes.  It was "Black Power," and it was good.  I am not sure we have that today.  There are black writers, comedians, and entertainers creating lots of product in Hollywood.  Some are good are some are not.  Some have talent and some do not.  It seems to me that most of them are establishment.  There is no ground-breaking material being seen or heard on prime time television.  There is murderous violence.  There is that.  Senseless mind-numbing violence.  There is not much material forging a new path for American cultural arts.  It would be difficult to do, because America has achieved her pinnacle.  Jazz landed squarely on the fringe of music.  The Avant Garde has yet to be usurped in terms of sonic power and intent.  America has yet to even recognize Modernism in history.  This milestone of musical achievement, a depiction of the hustle and bustle of city life, has not made a dent in American musical history.  People want to hear what they recognize and are not interested in having their sensibilities challenged.  We have become a tit sucking, addicted, sheltered nation of whiners, instead of those who built America.  We forget them and wipe them off the earth as soon as they are gone.  It is nauseating.  People are concerned with gender identities.  Is this really important?  Is championing your life by your sexual preference a worthy philosophy?  Okay, America has an extremely sexist history, but for the majority of history the human race as recognized heterosexuality as a good thing.  It only was when depraved, evil, zealots corrupted this alignment when thing went awry.  America is spring cleaning, and the trash is coming out.  All of it, and it is a good thing.  Get those puddles of tainted semen out of Hollywood studios, hire some women, and get it going again.  I don't enjoy feeling guilty for being straight.  I never have abused women.  On the contrary back in the day during the 1970's the courtship ritual was a very different thing.  Whether anyone will believe it or not, there are examples of when "No" meant "Yes."  We have lost sight of the very core of human interaction as a component of God's animal kingdom.  We no longer are powerful, confident, and assertive, because America is not smart enough to able to handle that responsibility.  As I look back at my public education I would change some things.  While I appreciate the courses which taught me to think, reason, and solve problems, I would also have appreciated some schooling in gardening, growing your own food, cooking, and repair.  We are a nation with no mainstream and with no idea how to live happily and successfully.  The media keeps us frightened, stupid, and compliant.  Our drinking water and air are laced with Gen. X, a chemical from a Chinese factory, and our streets are flooded with illicit drugs with which to hide our misery and ignorance.  Truly America has stopped empowering her citizens.  We have become a herd of cattle who digests insipidity.  Working on cruise ships for over a decade didn't help me in this department.  We are taught to "Greet and Smile," and that is good.  It is the hospitality industry, and you must be cordial.  Being subservient is something else, and I became that the same way modern television has.  We want out paychecks, and compliance is necessary.  The once Western Frontier which was host to gun play, dominance, and boisterous howling at the moon has been sucked into the internet draining the blood from our veins and the temperaments from our souls.  Anything you want is at your touch, except that it is not real. 

Sixty Minutes and CSX (hardly sixty seconds of sex)

Kudos to "60 Minutes" for their informative program this evening on the volatility of America's rail transportation systems.  It is nothing new to me.  I have been railing against rail, ever since I moved to Columbus, OH and discovered the labyrinth of track work in the city's infrastructure.  It is everywhere, both Norfolk/Southern and CSX-T's track throughout Columbus.  The old ConRail yard still exists as well.  I have a box of photographs in my closet taken on my Minolta 35mm SLR camera of all of it.  I became a "railfan," because I quickly deduced you could not beat their system, the rail industry that is.  We had a meeting of Federal Railroad Administration officials with local neighborhood organizations to air grievances over insensitive freight activity.  Locomotives were left idling for twelve hours at a time in close proximity to homes leaving black microdust residue for homeowners with which to contend.  They were not happy.  Neither was I.  I asked one official if he knew about the invasive nature of AC Traction.  He had no idea about what I was asking.  Tonight "60 Minutes" received refusals from three contenders in the rail debacle, CSX-T (who did send a letter), Amtrack (who refused to consent to an interview,) and the FRA, a taxpayer funded commission who according to our Constitution should be protecting the health and well being of American citizens.  They also refused an interview.  The consensus was the FRA is bought and paid for by the rail lobby.  They, like Trump's EPA and its new coal lobbyist leader, are not for the people.  They are for the corporations they are meant to watchdog and regulate.  America cannot compete with Europe's modern bullet trains, new trackage, and innovative outlook.  America is a spaghetti bowl of old track which is not capable of handling high speed passenger rail service.  The entities responsible for passenger deaths often has been Amtrack engineers.  Where is their oversight.  Most infuriatingly was the discovery that Amtrack is responsible for all damages incurred in their service, even if it was caused by the negligence of employees or track of their host rail company, that being CSX-T.  Although Amtrack is a for profit corporation run privately, it is subsidized by American tax dollars through Washington.  That is a sweet deal.  Americans are liable monetarily for damages incurred during Amtrack operation.  This is the taxpayers.  "Snap!"  Wake up and smell the roses.  CSX-T has been operating with no oversight since past Secretary of the Treasury John Snow consolidated it from Chessie and Seaboard Coastline.  He built the company into a profitable entity and then got out.  Only last year Hunter Harrison's name was used to bolster CSX-T stock.  Unfortunately for them he died a few months after become their CEO.  His emergence into CSX-T was enough to raise stock prices for a brief period.  The major interest in CSX-T is held by a hedge fund owner.  Certainly the most ruthless and wreckless financial instrument has qualifications to manage one of America's largest freight railroads.  Accidents continue, because Washington is not doing its job.  What a surprise.  

Stuck in a Studio

There is a lot going on.  I feel like the whole world around me is spiraling downward out of control.   I remember irrational behavior from my childhood, petty, back-stabbing, jealousy.  I haven't had to deal with it in decades.  It is a downer.  When I was young and zealous in the field of music, you had to have a certain degree of moxy to succeed.  Without drive, confidence, and a tangible goal no musician would be successful.  It is a disheartening to be dragged back down into an environment where musicians are being competitive.  I don't do music for this reason anymore.  I never really did, but interestingly enough I was pulled into this behavior by another.  I am watching this scenario now as I write.  My only interest in the field of music was to be a college teacher.  I watched my father be a band director my entire life, and perhaps this is why it does not appeal to me.  All ready I have done it, vicariously through him.  He was excellent at it and had the proper training.  I do not.  My music education degree at UNC while empowering intellectually was not effective practically.  I have written about this before.  The School of Education was weak when I attended UNC.  I received very little instruction on how to teach.  I didn't need it, because I had watched my father do it my entire life.  I was not worried, but I knew I didn't want to teach high school.  As such I was able to teach college for three years, two as a graduate teaching associate and one as an adjunct faculty member making a whopping eight thousands dollars a year.  They took advantage of me in their time of need, USC.  I was cast into the wind after their crisis past, but it didn't.  I continued to be a crisis for several years, because they found the wrong man.  Water under the bridge.  I was pretty aggressive back in the day, but you had to be.  I was moving and shaking getting gigs, building my resume, and performing music I had written.  Today as an adult I am tired of myself.  I have no energy to go out and tell others how great I am.  It is boring.  I do music for myself for the spiritual and artistic fulfillment, but you can't help be be pulled back into the heat of it in one way or another.  There are two doctors of piano in Fayetteville and probably more.  I complete the coursework for a DMA in composition.  It is a different thing all together.  No endless nights playing classical music in a practise room reading music.  Reading.  Reading music.  I of course can read music.  I took twelve years of piano lessons.  I play Rhapsody in Blue on my senior piano recital on the heaviest Baldwin action ever.  It was a terrible piano.  Betty Mohn had a Steinway and it was light.  I fought it so Bob Ladehoff said.  He could tell I was struggling with the heavy keys.  I can read music, and I understand complicated musical language.  I just chose not to be a doctor of piano.  Like John Williams and many other concert pianists, we chose not to endure the anxiety of that environment.  I do play the piano, and I play it well.  I know jazz.  I have studied it my entire adult life.  I can improvise.  I can play various styes of music on the piano including country, blues, and rock.  I have an authoritative understanding of keyboards including the Hammond organ and synthesizers.  Still I cannot help but be sucked into what is the status quo of piano where I live.  I do not market my skills in public.  I do not tell others how wonderful I am.  I just play, because I am a musician.  It is a downer having to market your wares.  I watched the Rachmaninov documentary the other night, and it seems he was miserable.  One does not deserve to be miserable when they are composing or performing.  If you are it is the fault of a superficial society.  My grift is this.  I have a studio which I have crafted to record music.  I can sequence music via MIDI, and I can record digital audio with it.  Therefore I am capable of producing fully orchestrated pieces of music.  I can't replicate a full big band or orchestra, but on a small scale of commercial music I can create a musical and listenable product.  My sound is excellent, and the man with the best sound wins.  The problem is, as my mother likes to point out, that no one around here will her what I produce.  That is why we use YouTube.  I released by album projects of original music on Distrokid and immediately saw that I would make no money from it this way.  The issue with digital distribution and its unfairness to artists is real.  The performing arts societies along with industry leaders crafted new legislation and pitched it on capital hill with the help of Orrin Hatch.  It was an effective presentation, and the new legislation seemed poised to compensate writers and artists for their work.  Since the internet revolution, Steve Job's advent of iTunes and the Apple store, and the inception of streaming music services, artists have gotten the shaft.  As such the entire process of creating and recording music, like our system of public education, has devolved into childish fodder.  Living in the midst of this unavoidable void of musical integrity is a challenge, and I will not give in.  I will not watch prime television.  I watch very little television anymore except for movies which have become classics.  They are classics because the possess all of the elements necessary for quality art.  Music is key in this films, and film music is an unsung hero in music history.  I am learning more about it each day.  What I like about film music is that it is the culmination of all things good in music.  Changing of mood and texture, style, modernism, and appeal at times challenge European orchestral an chamber music for viability.  We no longer live in the times of court.  We live in America today, and possibly film music in the near past has been most effective synthesizing disparate elements of American life.  Composers such as Dave Grusin, Jack Nitzsche, Lenny Neihaus, and Quincy Jones are the true musical celebrities of today, and yet they go unnoticed.  My musical drive competes with itself and no one else.  I am open to learning new and enlightening things, and each day opens a door to knowledge I do not possess.  I feel stupid at the moment, because I am surrounded by petty bickering.  It takes work to keep myself motivated and on track musically.  I do so by continuing to buy music on CD.  My classical and jazz selection is expanding to a more fulfilling level thanks to Jazz24 and YouTube.  This awareness does not usurp the level of intelligence around me.  It is a struggle.  I am stuck in the middle of producing in my studio (easy) and creating a live product.  It is confusing.  I am honing in on the concept, having drum patterns at my disposal for all of the styles I enjoy playing live.  These are very different from the majority of music I have recorded.  I need Bossa Nova, Samba, Cha-cha, Bolero, Waltz, Rumba, Polka, Funk and the rest.  I have drum sounds, but they are located in machines which are in my studio.   Should I extricate them and integrate them into my live playing system?  Never have I enjoyed the prospect of using a computer on my job.  First it is a major temptation for theft, a Macbook Pro just sitting there for the taking.  MIDI technology has shrunk over the years, so simple things are not as accessible.  I guess I need a new drum machine, a stand alone unit with programmable pads, many preset memory locations, ease of tempo change, and reliable not to mention good Latin and other ethnic sounds.  Any ideas?  My Roland Sound Canvas has nice Latin percussion sounds, but the Sound Brush no longer is available.  Floppy disc.  Really?  Bob Piasick?  Bueller?  Bueller?  Anyone?  Something that plays sample loops other than a computer plug in.  It is something to think about. I have diversified and began playing Hammond organ.  It is an aesthetic unto itself.  Never will I transport it out of my den, and that is okay.  It records well.  I am lacking studio space, a room large enough to hold all of my gear with enough space for performance.  I am squeezed into a house, and thus far it has been effective except that the neighbors are not thrilled with my musical inclinations.  A home does not offer the same mood as a jazz club nor an environment of creativity and freedom.  I am stuck. 

America's Preeminent Gutter Slang

I missed a large portion of American popular music, because I was not interested.  My youth after junior high school became methodical.  I had been taking classical piano lessons since first grade, and I wanted to play as well as my father.  I worked hard at it and playing the trumpet.  There was not much time for Rock 'n' Roll, concerts, smoking cigarettes, or drinking beer.  It was far more rewarding to me to try to excel in the field of music.  Since your opportunities were limited and the common consensus was musicians never make it, I had better try my hardest.  I did, so there was not any time for American popular music.  I was into jazz, because it was complex, interesting, and challenging to play.  Pop/rock tunes were simple and boring.  I never had a romantic crisis.  I never had an identity crisis, so I didn't need reconciliation from the pleasant words of a pop song.  I even missed the Beatles.  Luckily my awakening to the Beatles was during my thirties sitting in Chalkies' Billiard Parlor listening to their juke box.   Columbus, Ohio was a diverse place, more diverse than any other I had lived.  This is why I went there to work on my doctorate in music.  John Emche, my cooperating professor at USC-Columbia told me why he went to OSU.  It was a capital city, Cowtown, so there were gigs.  There was a "scene."  You could get playing work while you were working on your degree.  What he said was true, and my time at OSU became the best music education of my life.  It is hard to remember now being enveloped back in my hometown of Fayettenam.  It is a real challenge going backwards.  It nearly is impossible to change the clock and advance city past its limitations, limitations that have arisen because of lack of exposure to progressive ideals.  Things stay the same, and they have both at UNC and USC.  Nothing is different.  The same people are there or have died living there.  While there is new blood in Columbia and that is encouraging, for me it is old hat.  Been there, done that.  Columbus offered new musical challenges including the study of European chamber and orchestral music.  The main difference was the diversity, diversity having much broader influences from different peoples from different places.  Columbus was not a sheltered southern city steeped in its own traditions and unwilling to grow.  They were happy with things the way they were, and still they are, the way they were.  It is comical almost to have driven back through Columbia and see everything exactly the same thirty years later.  University traditions will do that.  They are good enough to persevere.  I am struggling to remember past that time and that education, and it is difficult.  When I can remember Columbus a sense of peace and tranquility overcomes me.  My anxiety to have to prove myself dissipates and I relax.  Musical creativity comes much easier in this state.  You can't force it, and that is where I have been for the last few months.  You must live in the space you are, or you will be unhappy.  Each day you will deal with the reality and limitations of your environment.  For me here it is a colloquial music education.  That is how my student teaching experience was, and it has not changed, this place.  Still it is sheltered and mired in the smegma of its own people.  What's the point?  The point is that we have to survive, and to survive we must try to be happy.  For me to be happy I deserve at least a drop of camaraderie.  Of this I have none, except for one acquaintance with which I share a professional contract.  Instead I find myself trying to define myself in everyone else's terms.  How can you not compare yourself to what is around you.  There are no composers here, and if there are they have their own circles and obligations.  I have pontificated making a stab at their world, but I am cynical.  Instead I have opted to forget myself and stew in the mash of life that surrounds me.  It is frightening.  What I see on TV is a depiction of music that is not real.  Its language aspires to bring the English language to its most uneducated form.  It glorifies contraction, short hand, slang, jargon, and seeming ignorance as music.  Even in my never-ending interest in American dialect for musical purposes, I can find to merit in this language.  The only way I can justify it simply is to say it aspires to be ignorant so that others ignorant will feel included.  It is the lowest level of capitalism not seeking to state a message, a concern, or a point-of-view.  It only is tribal and seeks to unify at the most base human level.  It may be that this also is Trump's method.  Extremism, violent terrorist sentiment has infiltrated American pop culture and is is stoking a deconstructionist movement that threatens to tear our country apart in tribal civil war.  And yet there is little concern.  We are broadcast the most ignorant images and messages on television underscored by innocuous, insipid, menial music which attempts to lull us into a blind allegiance.  Truly it is brainwashing as potent as Big Brother, but disguised as the most tepid saccharine.  During Black History Month television is littered with racist images as insulting as blackface.  Hypocrisy of race is seen on late night television each day beneath exploited images of the Little Rascals, slavery, and minstrels, yet we decry such imagery during the day.  There is nothing pure, just, or honest in the intentions of modern television.  It seeks only to exploit for its  own gain with a promise of integrity.  If I ever did find myself teaching in a public classroom in America today, the first step to educating our youth is teaching them to speak and write, and not in the gutter slang that has been created and manipulated to gain favor and revenue.  That language has no meaning and no purpose other than to devolve our children.  No parent, elected official, or clergyman has the courage to say it. 

Give Me Your White Trash

I have thrown myself back into the stew.  After spending the majority of my life studying music, musical styles, and music composition and arranging, I have dropped myself back into the stew of the history of American music.  When I took my General Exams for completion of the Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition at The Ohio State University, little did I know how unprepared I was.  I adequately was prepared with the appropriate knowledge in my subject area.  I knew and understood music theory.  I had studied various forms of harmony, counterpoint, form, motivic development, and melody.  This included J.S. Bach's four part writing which we learned in Music Theory 101 at UNC-Chapel Hill.  I knew tonal harmony, modality, twelve tone, pan diatonicism, and other harmonic systems such as those used by the Second Viennese School.  This included Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg, his pupils.  I have written a breadth of contemporary classical piano music, which I will publish in the future.  It is in the process of being refined in computer notation.  None of these areas of study remotely are related to musical reality in my current station in life.  While there are two universities nearby with music schools, I doubt that either has a program in music composition.  They struggle to keep any music students at all, and while they have graduated professional musicians in the past, their music faculties have been hired to do things other than graduate music students.  This is a bit of an irony.  The faculties at both universities perform a different function.  There are not enough music students to merit a full time faculty, so a core of doctoral level professors cover the bases.  I am not sure what they are, even though my sister graduated from one of these institutions.  I can be bold enough to say that they are very different from UNC-Chapel Hill.  I have had one college job interview in my lifetime.  It was Western Carolina University, and I did not fare well in my interview process.  I had been working on the D.M.A. in composition at OSU, therefore I was accustomed to graduate lecture classes, composing music, and existing in a professional plane.  Little did I know that Western Carolina University had no doctoral program.  They had a limited Master's program, and the job for which I was interviewing was?  I to this day don't really know.  It was a four area position.  Those four areas were Sightsinging, MIDI Lab, Jazz Ensemble, and Contemporary Theory.  No music history.  No music appreciation.  No applied lessons.  (or perhaps there was some jazz piano)  I was capable of covering these topics, but I'll admit sightsinging was not my specialty.  I learned my intervals in Music Theory 101 at UNC, and I could sing them mostly.  I was a capable pianist, so I could harmonize, transpose, and improvise.  I was a good musician, but that Sightsinging thing.  Most people don't know what that really is, being able to sing a melody from written notes on a page.  The method taught at UNC by Dr. Anne Woodward was solfege.  Solfege assigned a syllable to each note of the diatonic scale to make it easier to sing them.  Each syllable, say Do, Fa, or La represented a pitch in the major scale.  I all ready know how to sing the intervals, say a  Perfect 6th having learned it in Music Theory class.  "N-B-C."  Having to learn a syllable, a word to represent this pitch seemed ludicrous to me.  "Do -La."  This is what she required.  For me it became strict memorization.  She wanted us to sing all the parts of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" in solfege for our final exam.  They were in different clefs.  Most people don't know that there are clefs other than treble and bass.  There are alto and tenor clefs.  There is soprano clef and mezzo soprano.  She wanted us to be able to sing in this clefs by using moveable Do.  Moveable Do assigns the syllable Do to the tonic of whatever key in which you are going to sing.  I had been reading piano music since the first grade, and I all ready knew how to sing these pitches.  Her method meant I had to learn and assign a word syllable to each pitch and sing it instead of a lyric.  If I had just resigned myself to her methodology, I would have memorized these syllables.  Do through Ti like the song from the Sound of Music, but I had a mental block.  Why do this, when I all ready could sing the appropriate pitches having learned the intervals.  It appeared to me to be jumping through hoops to get a grade.  As such I made a 59 on my final exam, which would have kept me from graduating.  Because she knew I deserved my degree, she gave me the one point.  Thank you, Anne Woodward.  We don't live long enough to waste time in this life, and I did not have enough time to learn her method.  It was not necessary.  In any case this is what they wanted at Western Carolina, a class in solfege.  I wonder if Mr. Pavel Vlosek, the North Texas graduate who got the job is still teaching this.  It would seem at any university the responsibility of its music faculty is subjective.  I have heard horror stories about music faculties and their accompanying politics.  These are the hoops which must be jumped through to teach at the collegiate level.  It is difficult to say if any music program at any university is viable anymore.  Berkeley College of Music in Boston began selling degrees not that long ago.  If you pay your tuition, they will give you a degree.  It may have nothing to do with music study.  I suspect our entire academic system in America has become the same way.  Upper education became big business, and state legislatures kept approving the maximum amounts of tuition increase each year no matter what.  College educations became high dollar affairs, and students began to graduate with debt before their careers even had begun.  This is a travesty.  As such never have I looked back.  The academic system of music in America is antiquated, anachronistic, and ineffective, because the only jobs to be had in the field of music are back in academia.  It is an incestuous relationship.  Pop music was bought out by digital distributors, and prime time music talent shows have become radio stations.  It all is smoke and mirrors, and dare I say that symphony orchestras are the only musical entities left which are realizing music in a historically thoughtful way.  Wynton Marsalis and his jazz foundation are not promulgating jazz, they are marketing pop for their own well being.  Never have I heard such an unswinging, unhip, Uncle Tomming orchestra in my life catering to what they think is the "In Crowd," these exact academicians.  It is a huge jerk off assemblage, and it has nothing to do with music or music's real intentions.  It is vying for power, prestige, and money.  Wouldn't it be nice if we could exorcise this contingency in America and return her to her grassroots?  Reestablish core American values shaped by the settling and development of virgin land.  Rid America of the controlling populace who grossly are ignorant of any real effort, sweat, or blood?  I have dropped myself back into the stew of America, and it is awful.  The racism, the violence, and above all the ignorance.  I have come to realize that America is nothing more than a posse of privileged white trash.  This is why my musical education is inconsequential. 

The White House Becomes the Farm House

How to bring light to a subject, a touchy subject, which requires attention.  I feel like a teacher.  I feel like a teacher in an era where teachers are not supposed to have opinions.  The profession of teaching has been so degraded there is no visible model left to buck the status quo.  It has become all about being liked.  "Like us on Facebook."  "Like us on Twitter."  The longevity of society no longer has anything to do with being liked.  During the plantation South perhaps protocol was so authoritative it dictated one's behavior.  There were manners, and I grew up with manners.  Manners are a good thing, when the controlling faction of society is honest and good.  This would have been a time when teaching was in vogue.  The P.T.A. were honest and good.  Society respected teachers and vice versa.  There was a mutual respect, because teachers were entrusted with the responsibility of rearing children.  Parents may have been busy running the family business or household.  It was acceptable that children spent the majority of their time in public schools, which were well funded, efficient, and useful.  What changed?  From my viewpoint American society reneged on this obligation.  They implemented a power play for control and left schools and their teachers in the lurch.  Modern parents became the all knowing caucus, and they took control.  Teachers no longer were free to educate children, because if a teacher is not allowed to have an opinion, they are nothing more than a pawn in America's system.  That is what we all have become.  "Like us on Facebook."  Be part of our club.  Get along.  Don't make waves.  If you are one of the "In Crowd" things may be okay for you.  If you are an outsider then you get what we have now, a White House full of society but with no clue how to educate anyone.  It takes teachers.  It takes engineers.  It takes artists.  It takes an entire force of intellect to form a nation.  That intellect must at all costs question society and its intent.  Tough questions must be faced.  Difficult decisions must be made, and these queries must challenge the status quo.  America no longer is able to trust the status quo, because so many things have changed.  Because of status quo disease has escalated.  Cancer is on the rise.  Pollution is rampant.  The earth is warming.  Many of these ills have been created by accepting the status quo.  "We're making money, Jim.  Why change?  What's wrong with our coal-burning power plants?"  During fruitful times in American history teachers were a necessary catalyst in change.  They resisted the pressures of society and government and challenged students to think through issues concerning the longevity of American society.  They were able to stand up to bullying politicians, governors, mayors, and school boards, because a breadth of information was their tool.  Knowledge prevailed.  That no longer is true.  We now live in a time of lies, rhetoric, and spin.  Wealth provides this false comfort.  It has become foreign and uncomfortable to resist the status quo or the "In Crowd."  Luckily we have current models, and in due time have left the White House.  These members of Trump's administration have made the tough decision to part with what has been the accepted status quo in America, the White House. 

American Life Has Been Lost in Its Digits

It's a bit unnerving to be living at the end of an era.  When we were young, there was not doubt that the future held the promise of success.  We were not worried about the longevity of our nation, the threat of evil immigrants, or a new Cold War.  The politicians of my lifetime for the most part were caring about the substance of American life.  I was lucky enough, although I missed the Jazz Age, to live through three decades which reaped artistic benefit.  If you interview music writers, they will tell you that the 1970's were a time of unparalleled musical outpouring.  Like jazz, which remains mostly anonymous to mainstream America, this music and the music of the 1980's and 90's has yet to be studied.  The music that has been studied has been around much longer, so I surmise the music with which I am familiar and have come to appreciate will be recognized much further down the road.  Jeff Lorber, who pioneered the group The Jeff Lorber Fusion, waited forty years to receive his Grammy.  His albums of the l970's were ground breaking in both musical content and technology, and yet he saw no real recognition until last year, 2018.  Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock have been recognized for their stellar contributions to the field of music, and they are eighty years old.  True recognition of musical achievement it would seem in America is a matter of waiting.  Only pop stars reap the rewards of immediate success, and this fuels the American music industry.  Unlike in America's history music today has become a matter of immediate gratification, get rich quick, and show me the money.  This is a grave concern.  As I have aged in my career as a professional musician, performer, and composer, I have watched the institution of the American music industry die.  When the time is taken to study America's musical past it will become evident that our music industry has been in the forefront of artistic achievement.  Great strides have been made in American music, and most of them all ready are lost.  Listen to any film trailer broadcast on television, streaming, or in a preview at a movie theater and you will hear the same regurgitated "jungle drum" music cue that has been sufficing for a decade.  This same bombastic, compressed, soulless, noise brigade suffices as a musical teaser for just about any movie.  The only conclusion that can be made is that film studios spend zero money on music for their film trailers.  They have a limited library of prerecorded cues and drop one in with nary a thought for real promotion of the movie.  The same "jungle drum" cue is used over and over for different films.  There are several answers for the use of the cue, and let it become a metaphor what the film industry has become.  It also can be a metaphor for what America has become.  We are cheap, paltry, and superficial.  Japanese video games have infiltrated the film industry, and the one humanistic, intimate, and thoughtful nature of film characterizing human behavior has been replaced with violence.  It is startling if one really pays attention.  I have said it time and time again, that extremism has seeped into American society through television and film.  Who is producing this nonsense?  A step in the right direction for America is an examination of our pop culture.  I can't watch prime time television.  I can't watch movies produced in the style of a Japanese-made video game.  I can't watch senseless violence and murder.  Why would I want to?  Without expounding on the shortcomings in Hollywood, it is easier to make the example with American music.  As I played solo piano this weekend at a German restaurant in Fayettenam, my mind was assaulted with all of the possibilities.  My cocktail style of piano, which has been appropriate most of my life, didn't seem like the correct approach.  A German restaurant was not a country club.  It was not the Pinehurst Hotel.  It was not an expensive steak house.  It was a run of the mill eatery specializing in German food.  They play polka music on the stereo, but they hired me to play piano.  It was up to me to decide on the correct approach.  What should be such a simple engagement in fact was an epic lesson in the history of American music.  They had a digital piano, and it was a good one.  What are the possibilities?  It became clear to me then and there that America's pop history has been forgotten.  Being forgotten there is absolutely nothing left as a foundation for a new music industry.  Foreign interests, immigrants, and taken the reins of the American music industry, and it is a disgrace.  I thought, "I am not Billy Joel."  What a great artist this man was.  So many songs, a great singing voice, and a substantial pianist.  He was a star back in the day.  "I am not the Beatles."  What a catalog of songs which influenced America in so many ways.  Then there are blues, Broadway, Reggae, Folk, Rock, and Country.  There were so many ways to approach a simple engagement playing piano in a German restaurant.  So many different types of people.  So many age groups.  I did what I always have done.  I tried to mix it up.  Eventually my cocktail stylings prevailed.  What was most important was to be in the background providing a pleasant mood for the diners.  That meant that while "Hum and Strum" could have been appropriate, they hired a pianist.  While thinking about all of these options is when I realized that the music industry in America is now defunct.  If we want a pattern for healthy living in America free of the violence that came with the Trump administration, the first thing to do is reform America's music industry.  It is not really an industry at all anymore.  It is a distribution industry.  The new music that is being made today is a pale shadow of America's production in her heyday.  Whether it was the Roaring Twenties and Tin Pan Alley, the Jazz Age, Big Band Swing, or the moxy of Stax Records, pop music today in America is a castrated product to which youth have become addicted.  Everything it seems in American pop culture is an addiction.  Why must be become addicted?  The answer is because the quality is not there underneath the quick fix.  It is all quick fix.  It is quick fix, because what it takes to produce quality music indeed incorporates an entire industry.  There are writers in the Brill Building.  There are recording studios such as Columbia and RCA.  There are sound stages on movie lots.  There are jingle factories.  This was when real acoustic music, sounds waves created by people and things uninhibited from infrasonic pollution and noise had the power to shape lives.  It was a powerful industry, one that usurped the film industry.  What do we have today?  We watch millennials pantomime with prerecorded tracks on television.  Tracks do most of the work.  Prime time television is littered with exploitative talent shows promising dreams for middle America.  It is a charade.  It is a charade of charlatans exploiting America's youth in a much more insulting way than Stax Records.  At least the black characters in their Blaxploitation films were strong, independent, and forward thinking.  Through America's pop music, we have created a castrated, addicted, sheltered youth we are not able to cope with reality.  During Black History Month I have heard numerous black youths say they don't want to be reminded of what their people did, or your people, or our people.  Ignoring out past is the perfect solution to annihilation.  If you don't recognize and understand things that came before you, you are living in a bubble of constructed utopia, and it is far from that.  America has become a severe, violent, maelstrom of racism, classism, and nepotism.  I never have experienced anything so offensive.  When I think of jobs that were in existence during America's lifetime, plain and simple jobs that were deemed important and worthy of rewarding.  What do we have today?  What do we value?  Nothing.  We have tainted food, addictive drugs, fake art, polluted air and water, and a fascist as a president.  Inflation continues, wages are stagnant, and education is a ghost in America's closet.  Who in this country has decided this?  We are the digital age.  We are the age of the internet.  Therefore internet moguls have attained power and have devalued most of what is valuable in American society.  We are ashamed to look at slavery, blackface, and oppression, and yet these very things are what shaped the heart and soul of America.  We would not have jazz, blues, or many other artistic creations had it not been for our exact history.  Today we are hiding that history, which only is empowering the digital age.  When I heard a Hillary Hahn recording this evening on WCPE which was engineered direct-to-disc, I was overtaken with the authenticity, intent, and artistry of the music.  It was retro.  It was a sounds that I have not heard in years, an analog representation of music which was full of life.  American life has been lost in its digits.  

Tighty Whitey and Blackface

It is no wonder America is in a predicament.  (No one much is reading my blog except the Huff Post.  Kudos to them)  It is Black History Month.  This must be the reason why my instincts are telling me to research "blackface."  America is in a predicament, because we have failed our youth.  We have disguised our past.  We have exploited our children.  We have lined the pockets of racist America.  America had made great strides in civil liberties.  During the Clinton Administration "multiculturalism" was a focus of government, not "globalism."  That is because the Clinton's were democrats.  They cared about the lives of all Americans, not just the rich.  Multiculturalism was about American diversity through the influence of all races, nationalities, and cultures.  "It takes a village," Hillary wrote.  In came Bush, and "globalism" became the interest.  Globalism is a synonym for world dominance.  In an idealistic sense it meant opening world markets to each other.  How can one nation achieve this without savvy foreign policy?  Ronald Reagan set the stage for globalism by ending of the Cold War.  Richard Nixon forged a relationship with Red China.  Bill Clinton created the Dayton Accords solving the Bosnian Conflict, which no one remembers.  Slobodan Milosevic was relieved of power, convicted, and imprisoned by the International War Tribunal at the Hague.  America has regressed since then.  Ethical ideals, intelligent policies, and moral sentiments have been replaced with shallow, greedy, narcissist delusions implemented by racists hiding beneath orange skin, yellow hair, and swollen jowls.  Hitler has been reincarnated in the clever guise of  KKK cloak and hood.  Closet Confederates are inciting murderous violence at faux political rallies.  All of this harks back to historical education, but Washington no longer deems public education or its teachers worthy of respect.  We don't understand our own history, so what emerges is angered violence.  It is not easy, the history of America.  In studying blackface I realized this.  America never has been "white" America.  We are a nation of immigrants, and these immigrants make up the DNA of America.  Anyone thinking that Anglo Saxon or Caucasion blood should dominate America is delusional.  We are mixed blood, and this the beauty of America.  Whence does this white supremacist thinking come?  One only has to look at the history of blackface to understand.  The American South was built upon slavery.  Slavery gave southern whites their wealth and power.  When Abraham Lincoln began to call for an end to slavery, the Civil War was created.  After hundreds of thousands of innocent American lives were lost and slaves were freed, the South continued to wage war upon black culture.  If they were astonished by African rituals, it was because they were in denial of their own wrong-doing.  Upon what else did freed slaves have to fall?  They were kidnapped from their native nation, shipped in shackles across a great ocean, and sold into slavery to white Americans.  Whatever problems freed slaves had were created by their own owners.  Transplant a man from his own soil speaking a different language and ask him to assimilate into a condescending, classist, judgemental society.  It should be of no great surprise that freed slaves became unruly, disruptive, or criminal.  It would have been quite the predicament, not as challenging as educating an ignorant American public today.  You can't argue with stupid.  The active campaign against blacks through entertainment, literature, and marketing is America's culprit.  Who were the influential families championing this war?  When one studies the literature it is clear defamatory stereotypical images were used to damage blacks, but not all of the images are as guilty as considered.  What seems not to have been taken into account is African heritage.  How was white America to know about African culture?  We were fighting the British, Mexico, and Spain.  We slaughtered Native Americans at Wounded Knee to acquire this country.  When was there time to understand black culture, slave culture.  It was a difficult situation.  It seems millennials today want to ignore America's history in favor of a naive innocence thinking Washington has our best interest at heart.  The holocaust was not that far in our past, and if we do not face evil square in its face, keep it closer than our loved ones, and monitor it on a daily basis it is not unfeasible that genocide could happen again.  America is the exception to world politics.  We have not had apartheid.  We have not had recent civil war.  We have not had tribal segregation, but other countries have.  If we do not keep abreast of our elected officials, demand righteousness from them, and eliminate them when they are wrong, America could slip into the same destiny as other third world countries.  America's youth has been brainwashed into passivity.  They are so ignorant Washington has been doing they want with no response for over a decade.  Pop music is a core tool in this conditioning.  The power of popular music, its messages, themes, and motivations have been castrated like a mute steer.  The once inspiring, honest, and reflective nature of popular music has been replaced with soft core pornography.  It is easy to justify, because when one looks around at reality anything is better.  This brutal reality of our political regime has fueled the opioid epidemic, drug wars, and domestic violence.  If there were something to look at in America that was positive, spiritual, and comforting, let it be seen.  Instead we have the anodyne of popular music, sterile prepared "tracks" with graphic images of sexuality.  Hard core pornography is available for free on the internet, so music moguls have capitalized on its soft core version, a more human, intimate, and seeming emotional experience through pop music.  Most people don't even realize what it is.  Until the music industry is reformed and stripped of its pornographic intent, America may never recover.  We will spiral into a decadent, depraved, and violent society fighting to the second coming of Jesus Christ. 

Mira's Argument

I don't have much time to write an in depth and scholarly blog entry, but I want to say this.  I heard Mira Sorvino on television chastise John Hughes for his movie "Sixteen Candles."  Those of you who don't know, John Hughes authored many of the hit movies released in the 1980's.  Many of them were fantasies.  Are you listening, Mira?  I love your work.  "Mighty Aphrodite" was a delightful film, and perhaps you have a different opinion of it today, playing a whore that is.  Since Harvey W. tainted Hollywood with his foul-smelling semen dripped into a potted plant, things have not been the same.  That does not give anyone the right to project a value judgement out-of-context.  There has been a lot of out-of -context reporting lately.  As a naive, vindictive, selfish American society, no longer do we allow the accused innocence until proven guilty.  We sling mud to our hearts content, until someone responds.  It is not a prudent policy.  Mira's comment was anachronistic.  She was commenting on a fantasy film written for entertainment in an era when it was not politically incorrect.  If you grew up in a different era, you may not know this.  Most millennials have little understanding of American history, especially recent pop culture.  Things were different in the 1980's.  Then president Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War.  Are you listening?  Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War!  Today our President of the United States is resurrecting the Cold War.  Imagine the difference, a time when the threat of global nuclear war was gone?  The economy was solid.  Vehemently many do not agree with trickle down economics and its effects.  I'm not sure if I do, but the 1980's was more pleasant than today.  There was an integrity and solidarity in American society, a substance, which is lacking today.  That sense of well being gave Americans the security to laugh.  We were not fighting for our survival.  We could breathe, relax, and laugh at ourselves.  We could indulge.  We could fantasize.  Indulgent may be the most accurate word to describe the 1980's.  What's the big deal?  Today because millennials are culturally ignorant about American pop history, many things are being taken out-of-context.  For example a black face photograph in a year book may not have been as inciting then as it is today.  Many people do not know that black face was not meant to be insulting to Negros.  It instead was a raciest society trying to portray Negros in the Minstrels, Vaudeville, and Broadway.  Not unlike the limiting of civil rights in the Jim Crow South, Negros were not allowed to participate in musical drama.  Blackface merely was the the attempt of a white actor to portray a black character.  Like any dramatic role the depiction could have been good or evil.  No one seems to understand while stereotypical Negro images appear offensive today, they must be understood in context.  We don't even know what the context was, because American history writers have altered accounts of oppression in text books.  None of us has first hand experience living during slavery.  We can read about and imagine it.  All races can, because of the Nazi holocaust.  Black American slavery was not the only slavery.  It began earlier in many European nations.  Slavery was inherent in newly emerging American society, so society found ways to defuse it.  In entertainment one method of relieving racial tension was parody.  Mick Jagger forged his career in Rock 'n' Roll mimicking the gait of a clucking chicken often parodied by slaves themselves while engaging in the dance the Cakewalk.  These colloquial habits are the sources of many of the stereotypical Negro images which seem so offensive today.  Mammy.  Uncle Tom.  Little Black Sambo.  These not always were offensive.  Contrarily they attempted to provide love in a society charged with racial injustice.   Cartoon images of  stereotypical blacks were meant to provide warmth, familiarity, and escape from the everyday tensions of slave-owning plantation life.  Viewed today they would seem insulting and patronizing, but viewed in the time period in which they were conceived, they had a different intent and therefore meaning.  If Mira chooses to take a 1980's era John Hughes film and decry it, because it casts a woman as a drunken slut, then she is missing the point.  Film not always is art.  Often films are not meant to educate.  Especially they are not meant to be extrapolated into sexist entities, if during their time they functioned differently.  If Mira wants to champion the miscasting of females in Hollywood, then she should ask the actresses who played those roles if they would not have taken them for sexist reasons.  They chose to play those roles just as Playboy playmates chose to accept their images as sex symbols.  They had foresaw no problem with that imagery.  They were not championing civil rights.  Not all women feel the same way.  Not all women are offended by God's designation that women be feminine.  It was not Adam and Adamina in the Garden of Eden.  It was Eve, and some women still are comfortable being Eve-like.  Certainly in my experience many women embody the essence of Eve offering their bite from the forbidden fruit.  She was the temptation, Eve, not Adam.  Many want to change the definition of women, but many are content with it the way it traditionally has been defined.  "Sixteen Candles" was an adolescent sex fantasy never meant to be taken seriously.  Adults can tell the difference.  The financial instrument of taking people's words and actions out-of-context anachronistically to make money should cease.  History when appreciated for what it teaches will be the one thing which allows a plural interpretation of life over time.  The mono-dynamic, fascist, oppressive Trump doctrine which is being implemented today via Washington will be recognized, annihilated, and seen as the Nazi-ism it really is.