Sensualist by avocation
Every touch is significant
Leading, probing, teasing, lingering
Every look weighted with flirtation
Promises of escape and fulfillment
A prelude to restless joy

Paying close attention to the sounds
The sound of names, repeated
Names, again and again
Effortless this mantra
Then a high note punctuates the trance
So good, so good, repetition

Together, surrounded by pleasure
Together, covered by a blanket of soul
Singing softly, we compose a new song
Look, listen, feel, dream
Breathless, the sensations
A momentary taste of paradise
All that remains is the heat

Sensualist, a playlist

A soundrack for this note (spotify version)

• Just To Keep You Satisfied by Marvin Gaye
• Between the Sheets by The Isley Brothers
• Paradise by Sade
• Dreamin' About U by Prince
• Softly Softly by Sweetback ft. Maxwell
• Sensuality by The Isley Brothers

File under: sensory, emotion, life, culture, observation, perception, poetry, toli

Writing log. April 16, 2022

Serendipity. I'd been listening to José James's new album, 1978, on repeat all week and came across all the issues of Ebony magazine from that year at the library. Let's take a look at the year through that lens

Ebony 1978, an album

Starting at the middle of the year, June 1978 was the music issue.



On the cover, The Hottest of the Hot Groups in all their glory:

• Rufus & Chaka Khan
• Maurice White, Earth Wind & Fire
• Bootsy Collins, Bootsy's Rubber Band

The lead article actually focuses on five of the top groups then making waves



Would have thought The Commodores would be sure to feature, what with Lionel Richie and their origin story (meeting as freshmen at Tuskegee University). Ebony bait if there ever was such a thing. (they do get an inside photo)



Bootsy Collins was stretching out the funk with his Rubber Band. They had a great live reputation

Note the assertion in the ad: "Jamaica is more than a beach. It's a country". When you market yourself to black Americans, there's less of an emphasis on Jamaica as bacchanalia.



I note the interesting editorial decision that the body of the text discusses Parliament/Funkadelic and quotes George Clinton extensively, but they doesn't print any photos of them. Methinks P-Funk were too edgy for the straightlaced Johnson publishers.

Maurice White and Earth Wind & Fire were more wholesome and perhaps at their artistic peak. They released The Best Of Earth, Wind & Fire during the year. Mics were dropped.

This is Ebony so they only cover mainstream groups - no mention of say Cameo, Ohio Players, Brass Construction, Con Funk Shun, Bar-Kays, War, Mandrill or even Kool & The Gang even though all of them were in the mix in 1978.

The specter of disco is not mentioned here, the focus is on the bands with a reputation for their live shows and instrumentation. Albeit, Donna Summer had her Ebony cover the previous year. In 1978, she was working on Bad Girls. Hot Stuff and all that.



Earlier in 1978, the January cover was Richard Pryor. Sidenote: the more interesting feature is about "Black women - white men, the 'other' mixed marriage". Loving v. Virginia was only a decade in the past.



Hey! Cars of 1978 (disclaimer I now work at a car company so I've started to pay more attention to such things)



One of the pleasures of reading Ebony in those years was just how big the magazine was. The full tactile sensation turning those pages was unmatched. Typical issues were 160 pages, packed with advertisements, the style, the hair products etc. Call it the bourgeois id of black America.



Hey a Chevy, now that's more like it



March 1978 asked: Who is the greatest heavyweight champion of all time? Muhammad Ali or Jack Johnson? Ali was an evergreen topic for all media outlets throughout his life; any mentions boosted circulation.



The US Army was a big advertiser (after the final draft in 1972 as the Vietnam war wound down), the black community was heavily recruited by the military. All branches of the military placed enticing ads. (opposite The Pips)



March 1978 - readers respond to the Ebony class and style poll

The usual suspects win: Lena Horne, Sidney Poitier, Count Basie, Bill Cosby and Harry Belafonte. Black royalty.



Winners of the style poll: Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Richard Pryor, O.J. Simpson, Redd Foxx, Aretha Franklin, Billy Dee Williams, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Eartha Kitt and Ben Vereen (of Jesus Christ Superstar fame).



Ebony April 1978 black colleges choose campus queens. Ebony was a society magazine.

Note: the special report on "Detroit - Motor City makes a comeback" seemed a bit premature. How many comebacks has Detroit made?



Andrew Young had been made UN Ambassador under Jimmy Carter's administration. Great in prestige but still a servant to power. I wonder how say Linda Thomas-Greenfield's reputation will fare after the display of the past year shielding Israeli warmongering.



Natalie Cole was luminous as ever (May 1978 cover). Not quite sure that the feature about Older women - young men applied to her. Interesting juxtaposition though.



June 1978 focues on What's Happening!! the teenage comedy that was a big tv success, drawing on Cooley High



The fashion fair issue includes a spread: dress up for summer evenings. I can see my mother's flowing robes



Ebony July 1978 considers the new generation. I do wonder, did they leave a mark?



Ebony July 1978 sports a feature on Soul Train, The Outrageous Waack Dancers, Kirt Washington, Tyrone Procter, Cleveland Moses Jr, Jeffrey Daniel, Jody Watley, and others. The latter two spawned Shalamar



Ebony September 1978 again wondered Can old man Ali accomplish the impossible?



Muhammad Ali prepares for the rematch with Leon Spinks to regain his heavyweight title at the Superdome in New Orleans.



Note: Lou Rawls' Budweiser ad was doing numbers



Sidenote the second: the ads for mentol cigarettes and liquor are some of the more inventive

Ebony October 1978. Hollywood - how to survive between gigs. The feast and famine of creative types endures. It's the same old story



Ebony November 1978 Diana Ross debuts The Wiz (no mention of Michael Jackson who would steal the show). All I remember of her album of that year was the cigarette cover and, I guess, Reach out I'll be there. Nothing else stuck



Finally, Ebony December 1978 asked: is it true what they say about twins? Inquiring minds want to know



Going back to the first image, Ebony did hit on some touchstones in 1978:

• Earth, Wind & Fire released their greatest hits album and unleashed September. There were showing off by this stage
• Chaka Khan released her debut album although she wasn't done with Rufus by any means. She said it all with her anthem: I'm every Woman
• Bootsy Collins continued to made hay, touring on the strength of Ahh...The Name Is Bootsy, Baby!
• The Commodores came out with Natural High, Lionel Richie gifted us Three Times a Lady
• Parliament released Motor-Booty Affair and their live shows were the stuff of legend

I did mention the specter of disco that would decimate the funk bands in short order. Some adapted, but many didn't. e.g. Boogie Wonderland was a success, but James Brown didn't handle the transition. Indeed 1978 was the first time that JB didn't have a response to the music that was in the mix.

Not to be too reflective, but I should note that 1978 would mark a high-water mark for blacks and much of the working class in the US for a generation. They might have been grooving to Good Times by Chic or Y.M.C.A. by The Village People but the Reagan retrenchment was just around the corner. Eyes wide open.

The relative leveling of society and the real economic and civil rights gains would take a back seat. The gains that accrued over the next 40 years were unevenly distributed to say the least. It was Baby Huey's Hard Times or Gil Scott-Heron's Winter in America that ensued. But I digress.

On the brighter side, I had no agenda here other than to soak in those images and read up about those times. You had to be there I guess. Kudos to José James for the revival of music that mattered.

And for good measure, here's a massive playlist - the music of 1978. My own albums of the year were Golden Time of Day by Maze, Cool Ruler by Gregory Isaacs and Social Living by Burning Spear. Your mileage may vary...

File under: music, culture, Ebony, black, observation, perception, magazine, history, appreciation, USA, toli

Writing log: April 26, 2024

The best minds of my generation devoted to optimizing clicks
With an insight a minute they can overwhelm you with their tweets
It was a shrewd bet after watching the inexorable rise of Wikipedia
To fall in wholesale with the new and emerging commentariat

You might have attended the same schools
   as some of these members of the new media
Roamed the same halls
   studying lessons with the same cosmopolitan professors
Surprisingly, their main takeaway
   was a studied pose of technocratic neutrality
They may appear reasonable and sensible,
   but are handicapped by their incuriosity

Jack of all trades, their concerns are cross cutting
Sad that it seems they've chosen to launder attention
The paradox is that they are often on the right side of things
But choose to squander insight pursuing the wonkish instinct

If you follow their careers closely,
   you'll find the skein of careful punditry
Albeit with fetishized concerns,
   they are ever ready to pronounce reflexively
Sweeping arguments even when it's not their area of expertise
Wars, education, immigration, housing, how hard could it be?

Specialists on policy, whether foreign or domestic
Making claims to insightful views on economics
To opine is an inalienable right to them, if not an obligation
To scratch the surface of the discourse is their avowed inclination

Blind spots in abundance, historical amnesia is their lot
They give a free pass, the benefit of the doubt,
  to patent scoundrels
A repeated assumption of good faith of obvious rogues,
   mea culpas galore
They roam from think thanks, to podcasts and columns,
   it's a revolving door

But is there a there there?
   Does Vox Optima have lasting value?
Is this curious brand of earnest ersatz journalism simply filler?
When you play, as they do, the shell game of the media
One can only fail upwards in this celebrity culture

With their pose of arch seriousness and mask of the anxious
It's hard to locate them in the taxonomy of useful idiots
Some would place them between those who should know better
   and the ignorant
Methinks, though, that they're professionals,
   either opportunists or contrarians

Vox Optima, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Time's a Wastin' by Erykah Badu
• Don't Waste Your Time by Rachelle Ferrell
• Spinnin' by Chuckii Booker
• Serious Matter by U-Roy and Beres Hammond
• Are you Serious by Tyrone Davis

...

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

...

After some bright young things who came of age with the web. Middle age looms, you know, might be worth leaving a mark...

File under: culture, observation, perception, strategy, hatchet job, humour, opportunists, media, shell game, Buyer's Remorse, Observers are worried, toli

Writing log. April 15, 2022

I am not on campus this semester. I’m on sabbatical, sitting in coffeehouses, writing blog posts and a book.

But if I were on campus this semester, yesterday I would have seen the quad across the street filled with tents yesterday. And then I would have seen the police arrive, to break up the encampment. Not the campus cops either — the real ones.

Those are my students occupying the tents. I don’t mean that figuratively. Among the students who organized the protest action on campus yesterday are almost certainly people who have taken my strategic political communication class. They’ve shown up to my office hours. They did the reading. (FWIW, several of them are jewish.)

One book that I have my students read every semester is E.E. Schattschneider’s 1960 classic, The Semi-Sovereign People. The book is a tight 180 pages. It weighs only 7.1 ounces. I mention its weight because, if I were on any college campus right now, I would be mighty tempted to smack a few administrators in the face with it. Doing so would leave an impression without leaving a mark.

Schattschneider tells us that contentious politics can be best understand through a lens of conflict expansion. Those in power will (and, strategically, should) try to maintain and contain the scope of a conflict. Those arrayed against them will (and should) attempt to expand the scope of the conflict. If you want to understand an episode of contentious politics, don’t evaluate the substance of the arguments as though you are judging an intercollegiate debate. Instead, watch the crowd.

I don’t personally know Columbia University’s President, Minouche Shafik. But I am pretty confident that, unlike my students, she has not read her Schattschneider.

If you had asked me on April 17th what I thought of the Columbia University encampment, I would’ve shrugged my shoulders before apologetically explaining why it didn’t seem like an especially powerful tactic. Around 100 Columbia University students had set up a tent city on the campus quad. They were standing in solidarity with the residents of Gaza, while making demands of the campus administration.

This is a radical tactic, but it is not a novel tactic. It breaks campus rules while demonstrating commitment and solidarity among the participants. But it is also a radical tactic that is relatively easy to defuse or ignore. There is less than month until finals and the end of the semester. The students aren’t preventing the university from operating. They are making some noise and making a scene. Once the semester ends, the campus shuts down, as does the encampment.

The way that administrators normally respond to a tactic like this is to just wait it out. Have campus security keep an eye on them to make sure things don’t get out of hand. Make vague statements to the campus paper. Schedule some meetings. Maybe declare that you’ll form a committee to look into things further.

Traditionally, the weakness of this tactic is that it does little to expand the conflict. Students are outraged. They have demands. But they don’t have numbers or time on their side. Even when the majority of their peers agree with them, so long as the administration slow-walks the response, it will remain a conflict between the most-committed student activists and a slow-moving bureaucracy.

All the administration has to do is nothing. University administrators are great at doing nothing.

But that’s not how it looked to President Shafik. Because she wasn’t responding to the students.

She was responding to the former Presidents of Harvard and Penn.

Here’s the basic timeline of events.

• Five months ago, the Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified before a House committee. This was a trap. It was not subtle. Everyone knew it was a trap.

• Instead of prepping for the testimony by talking to a comms professional, they prepped by talking to a lawyer. (Don’t do that. Don’t treat televised spectacle like a deposition. It will go badly for you in all the very predictable ways.)

• Having screwed that up, outraged conservative alumni were able to force Penn’s President to resign. That was a win for them. They tried to force Harvard’s President to resign. That didn’t work, so they ginned up some more faux scandals until they got their way. Double-win.

• Fast-forward to this month. Columbia’s President is asked to testify before the House committee as well.

• She decides to do the opposite of those other Ivy League Presidents. That, apparently, is her entire comms strategy. Just agree with everything the hostile Republicans say, and hope they applaud you at the end.

• But they aren’t asking these questions in good faith. They are strategic actors, pursuing another win. (Again, this isn’t exactly subtle.)

• Having given them every answer they asked for, she then went back to campus and clamped down on the protest, in order to prove that she really totally meant it, guuuuuuys.

• They’re calling for her resignation anyway, and turning Columbia into a prop. Of course they are. That’s what they were planning to do anyway. You only win against these Congressional Republicans by refusing to play their game.

• But in the meantime, she called in the NYPD to clear the encampment. And she tried to shut down the campus radio station. And she barred journalists (IN NEW YORK!) from covering the Columbia protests (DESPITE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL BEING THE PLACE THAT AWARDS THE PULITZERS).

• And, oh yeah, now that the conflict has expanded, a bunch of protestors unaffiliated with the university, some of whom are rabid antisemites, are showing up and shouting things at students in front of cameras as well. Not great, because this part can potentially escalate in directions that pose an actual safety risk to students. (Unlike the encampment, which wasn’t a risk to anyone. And which you could’ve just ignored if you weren’t shadowboxing the phantom figures of other universities’ former presidents.)

• So now you’ve launched the biggest crackdown on campus speech since the 1960s. The conflict has now expanded. Every college campus is now going to feature an encampment. And that encampment is both a show of solidarity with people in Gaza and a show of solidarity with students at Columbia. (And Emory. And UT Austin. And probably a dozen other places.)

All you had to do was ignore the fuckin’ encampment for a month. Maybe make a bland statement. Have campus security issue a citation or two. Declare that a committee is going to look into things.

Saul Alinsky writes that “the action is in the reaction.” The campus encampments don’t work if you don’t react to them. And not reacting to student speech on campus is usually one of the things that university administrators do best.

Instead, here we are. Snipers on the roofs of major universities. Encampments springing up everywhere. Actual cops arresting students and faculty. Enough of a spotlight that every university administration is worried that shit might go sideways. Republican politicians gleefully egging it on, crowing about “chaos on campus.” (Because the more this moment resembles 1968 on tv, the better.)

The conflict has expanded. Colleges are passing draconian measures to clamp down on campus protest. Students are responding to those actions, and responding to the police violence. The action is in the OVER-reaction. The semester will end soon, but it now seems more likely that it will form an ellipses instead of an ending.

I’m worried for my students. They are smart and they are brave and they are outraged. They are facing batons and tear gas. This escalation did not have to happen. This escalation will not end well.

I blame Republican legislators. But I also expected them to behave this way. Tom Cotton is exactly how we thought he was. Elise Stefanik’s outrage is scripted, typecast. They have not been subtle about their views or intentions.

I did expect more from University administrators — Shafik especially. All she had to do was act like an average university administrator. Make noncommittal promises, and wait.

Now this is spiraling. And I sit here in this coffeehouse, tapping away at the keyboard. Hoping my students are safe. Hoping I taught them well enough. Wishing that the people who run universities would learn anything at all.

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“We need leaders. We need responsible citizens, sufficiently dissatisfied with things as they are and impatient enough to do something about it, intelligently, quietly, wisely. We need critics too, for dissenting is a serious, worthy, and honest pursuit.”

Read More …

Once again, the bean counters are having a field day
Ever since the tanks started rolling across the border
Every bullet, every missile, even if wayward, must be tallied
Every drone, every tank, every bomb matters in this accounting

Overflow flights, satellites pressed into service
High resolution images, surveillance analysis
Logistics is all in reality, feel free to talk strategy
Paying lip service to achievable political objectives

Ammunition analysts expound on dogma and distress
Manpower conservation and combat effectiveness
The fool's paradise of precision munition
The ultimate hubris of force projection

The subtle difference between annihilation
And the term of art, the war of attrition
Distinctions raised between regrouping and retreating
Sustained gains by ground forces and unit cohesion

Summoning tallies of the losses and casualty rates
Execution with poor coordination amidst endless debates
Fuel shortages and the care of the supporting cast
Envelopment of forces along the axis of advance

Armies need to be fed, there's the danger of diffusion of effort
The arrayment of infantry troops and their artillery support
Planning salient offensives and platoon positions
Competing priorities of squads, their bounds of operation

A crying shame, as ever,
   That we have normalized the machinery of death
Even the global pause was only temporary
   Viz the return of this madness
Futility, the marshaling of doctrine
   In service of chimeric victories
For when it comes to blood and sin
   There can only be routs and defeats

War, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• War by Edwin Starr
• Louder than a bomb by Public Enemy
• Choice of Weapons by Guru
• This is Madness by The Last Poets
• Isn't It a Pity by Nina Simone

A nice coda with reflective piano is The War of Northern Aggression by Van Hunt but sadly that isn't available on streaming services. Nina does the honors here to close things out, isn't it a pity?



...

I wrote this piece in 2022, it strikes me as perhaps even more timely today as a check the headlines. Isn't it a pity?

File under: language, war, culture, observation, perception, bureaucracy, military, economics, capitalism, absurd, outrage, blood, Observers are worried, The Rough Beast, poetry, toli

Writing log: April 3, 2022