Italian-born jazz vocalist Roberta Gambarini is up for a Grammy in 2010; here’s her MySpace page, and here’s her record label’s page for her.  And here are some YouTube samples of her work:

“The Sunny Side of the Street,” with the Willy Ketzer Quartet, from German TV:

“Centerpiece“

“Take the A Train“

The moderns

Industrialization means mass society, bureaucracy, high technology, political ideology; each of these things reduces the likelihood that a modern person will turn to another person as a particular living being and increases the likelihood that moderns will see each other as abstractions.  Analyzing this tendency, sociologist Max Weber said that the rise of bureaucracy locked moderns in an “iron cage of rationality”; characterizing modernity in general, Weber spoke of a “world grown cold.”  For centuries now, there have been those who have rebelled against modernity in the name of a lost human connection, and have harked back to premodern times.  This anti-modern tradition has found an American voice in Chronicles  magazine. 

In his column in the December 2009 issue editor Thomas Fleming informs us that “Reactionaries, alas, almost always ruin whatever good remains in a tradition.”  The rest of the issue is full of evidence for this view, I’m sorry to say.  Members of various Christian denominations take turns bewailing the rising support for gay rights among their coreligionists; persons of various nationalities denounce immigration in general and immigration to their countries by Muslims in particular; Paul Craig Roberts complains that because some parking spaces are reserved for the handicapped, the rest of us “are second-class citizens”; etc etc etc. 

There are some diamonds in the rough, however.  In the course of a denunciation of the liberal-minded leadership of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA, we read that Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori chose as the slogan for 2009’s triennial Episcopalian convention ”Ubuntu,” “which is supposed to be an African word for sharing and caring.”  Jefferts Schori’s opening address noted that “Ubuntu doesn’t have any ’i’s in it,” and went on to claim that individuality is found only in our dealings with each other:

The “I” only emerges as we connect- and that is really what the word means: I am because we are, and I can only become a whole person in relation with others.  There is no “I” without “you,” and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the One who created us.  

That sounds like fairly orthodox Christianity to me, and the suggestion that non-industrialized or lightly industrialized parts of Africa may have preserved a clearer understanding of the relationship between the individual and the community is certainly in line with the anti-modernist tradition from which Chronicles magazine springs.  But that isn’t the reaction this writer gives.  He seems to interpret it, not as an appeal to premodernity and a world without the coldness that comes with industrialization, but to the coldness of political ideology in its collectivist forms.  

The writer points out that Episcopalianism, the American branch of the Anglican Communion, has long been in decline, while Anglicanism has been growing in Africa.  However, the African converts to Anglicanism could not be further from Bishop Jefferts Schori’s liberal Anglo-Catholicism; they tend to be fierce defenders of traditional gender roles, so that a female Presiding Bishop who is a staunch advocate of gay rights would not be very popular among them.  Perhaps, the writer speculates, “Africans may need to send missionaries to convert American Episcopalians, Methodists, and other mainline Protestants to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  When the African missionaries arrive, Katharine Jefferts Schori will no doubt remind them that there is no ’i’ in ‘Ubuntu.’”   

Fleming’s own column, mentioned above, has one good passage.  Having visited a monastery, he wonders what his late father, a committed atheist, would have said about it.  He supposes he would have declared that the monks’ greatest accomplishment was “the mindless repetition of things that have been done over and over for two thousand years.”  Fleming’s reply to this imaginary attack is:

Excepting the “mindless” bit, I should say, “Yes, it is a great (if not the greatest) accomplishment to have gone through the same motions so many times for so many centuries.  We do not always know what or why we are doing.  Indeed, most of what we think we know we take on trust from a higher authority, like the television weatherman or an ill-educated high school teacher who once told us something about Galileo.  Jefferson, in a letter to a young nephew, described politeness as artificial good humor (a word that meant something like temperament or character): ‘it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.’”  That observation, elevated to the spiritual level, suggests that if we go through the same motions and repeat the same words our distant ancestors did, we may someday possess something of their Christian virtues.          

Most notable of the good bits is Chilton Williamson’s column.  Williamson is interested in the word “dignity.”  Williamson turns to a Latin dictionary for definitions of the root word dignitas.  Each definition he finds there “applies to some distinguishing quality, to something earned, or to something peculiarly inherited.  There is nothing universal about it.  All human beings are alike in having been made in the image of God, but that is not the same thing as saying that they share equally in the divine dignity, any more than they share in the divine goodness.” 

I wonder how seriously Williamson means these sentences to be taken.  If there is truly “nothing universal about” dignity, then one would think that it could not be shared at all.  The gulf between God’s dignity and any human being’s dignity would be absolute, and so would the gulf between one human being’s dignity and another’s.  As God alone would have divine dignity, so Williamson alone would have Williamsonian dignity and Acilius alone would have Acilian dignity.  Surely it wouldn’t stop there; isn’t a name a universal concept inasmuch as it suggests that the person who exists in one place at one time is the same as the person who exists in another place or at another time?  So that not only would one person’s dignity be a profoundly different thing from anyone else’s, but in every moment that compose the parts of a person’s life a new dignity would come into being and pass away, existing independently of the dignity of any other moment.  So even if my life (for example) were nothing but an exhibition of buffoonery and degradation for all but one instant, if I were to compose myself in that one instant I would, for its duration, be cloaked in dignity.  That does not seem to accord very well with the idea  of “something earned, or… something peculiarly inherited.” 

For all that, I hail Williamson’s concern for the particular as against the general.  That concern is the great strength of Chronicles magazine, and of the tradition that lingers on in its pages.  The desire to see a person as a particular being, not in any sense as an abstraction, is surely a healthy one, and where the Chronicles crowd has failed to achieve that desire I wish them better success next time.

Here’s a reminder of one of the all-time great jazz guitarists, Wes Montgomery. 

Willow Weep for Me

Impressions

Round Midnight

I’m not usually a fan of Lennon-McCartney jazz covers; Montgomery’s version of A Day in the Life is almost the only one I do like.

The latest Wondermark has the scrollover text “There was a period back in October/November when George was watching a lot of lute videos on YouTube.”  The fact that “a lot of lute videos” are now available to a couple of billion people is one of the reasons I’m happy to live at this moment in history.

A while back, I posted something here about jazz singer Hilary Kole, whose song “The Snake” sounds uncannily like Annie Ross.  I had to take that posting down when WordPress made some changes that made it unreadable.  Here’s another posting.

“‘Deed I Do,” live at Birdland

Misty

Lullaby, an original song by Hilary Kole

Charles Addams

Scholars ask, where did Santa Claus come from? 

Thomas Nast Cartoon

Others ask the same question, and come up with other answers. 

Where did Santa Claus come from?  From the marketing department of the Coca Cola corporation!

Santa, 1939

Where did Santa Claus come from?  From racism!  See how he treats his helper, “Black Pete.” 

Santa rides, Black Pete walks

Where did Santa Claus come from?  From the depths of Hell!  See his German alter ego “Krampus” below.

Another face of Santa

 Of course, no discussion of Santa’s enemies is complete without reference to the Martians.   Below is a poster for the great film.

They never had a chance!

Oh and did I mention, Santa’s a Communist.  In fact, he is Karl Marx himself.

Al Wood has posted two collections of Christmas-themed videos at Ukulele Hunt (here and here); his top pick from these two is Mad Tea Party’s “Oh Shit, It’s Christmastime.”  Armelle has posted an excellent collection at Ukulele and Languages.  My favorite of her picks is “Ukulele Christmas” by “yosinobu1950.”  UkeToob hasn’t put up a dedicated collection, but there are some Christmas songs there, most notably GensBlue’s Django Reinhardt-inflected ”All That Ukulele Christmas” and Ukulele Mike’s appealingly earnest cover of “Merry Christmas (War is Over.)” 

I won’t embed any of those videos here.  Instead, Ill post two of Armelle’s own, non-Christmas oriented, performances. 

Sverige (in Swedish)

What if a day, by John Dowland

This issue of The Atlantic has been lying around our apartment for several weeks while I worked on my actual job; last night, I had time to read it.  The one thing I wanted to note was Sandra Tsing Loh’s piece about how her view of herself as a mother has changed in the aftermath of her divorce.  Partly because she’s now virtually homeless, partly because she’s been smeared as a symbol of neglectful parenting on “blogs large and small all across our fair nation” (oh, and in the Los Angeles Times as well,) Tsing Loh now takes a hard look at the ideals of motherhood into which she was once indoctrinated and which she can no longer hope to meet.  She turns for enlightenment to a pair of books that I remember seeing all over the place in the 1970s, but that have apparently become hard to find in the last couple of decades: Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex.  She particularly recommends Greer’s chapter on “Family,” which traces the change from the traditional norm of a multigenerational extended family consisting of dozens of people related by blood who live and work together to the modern Western norm of the nuclear family, a couple and their children separated from their “stem families,” often by hundreds or thousands of miles.  Tsing Loh quotes Greer’s statement that the traditional family was a more stable system than the nuclear family because responsibility for its most crucial functions did not “rest on the frail shoulders of two bewildered individuals trying to apply a contradictory blueprint.”     

Some months ago I quoted Kurt Vonnegut’s remark that, “When a couple has an argument nowadays, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this: ”You are not enough people!”  It seems that Vonnegut and Greer were thinking along the same lines in some ways.  Not in all ways; Vonnegut seems to be suggesting that we as humans, by our nature, can be nurtured only in the bosom of a close-knit multigenerational extended family, while Greer’s argument leaves open the possibility that our need for extended families is one side of a contradictory inheritance from our pre-capitalist past, and that we might in time be reshaped so that we can find happiness without returning to the days before capitalism.  That’s a big difference, of course.   And Vonnegut’s remarks leave out the main theme of Greer’s study, the inequality of the sexes in various forms of family structure.  Close-knit multigenerational extended family groupings are usually, perhaps always, strongly patriarchal; the nuclear family may dethrone  the paterfamilias, but it may also isolate a wife from other women during her marriage and throw her naked to the cold winds of the labor market in case of divorce. 

Still, where Vonnegut and Greer do agree is that the nuclear family does not put enough people under a roof to maintain a stable home life.  The Supermom ideal which Tsing Loh has bitterly learned she will never be able to meet is a symptom of this underpopulation.  The future Supermom is supposed to establish herself in “a cool Creative Class career, like Writer.”  Then, she adds to that career a second career, as Child Care Provider Extraordinaire.  ”Today’s Professional Class mothers are expected to have… the personalities- and the creative aspirations- of elementary school teachers.  But if you’re like me, you can’t compete with those seasoned professionals for whom child education is an enthusiastic vocation.”  Unless your Creative Class career is as an elementary school teacher, you are almost certain to be like Tsing Loh.  Surely it would be a miracle of sorts if a person whose background was in one profession could, on the strength of no particular training, match a qualified and experienced professional in another profession, whatever her personality.     

Supermom, by dint of her miraculous gift for childhood education, then shepherds her children into Creative Class careers of their own.  And the requirements for membership in the Creative Class are unforgivingly narrow; ”We see, at our Creative meetings, the line that separates state-college folk from Ivy alums.”  It’s all well and good if your kids are writers or artists or whatever, but if their degrees are from humble adult education programs like the University of Michigan or UC Berkeley, it doesn’t count, apparently.  You’re still a flop as a mother.  The Creative Class Supermom not only guides her children into this fantastically narrow mold, she does it  without stifling their individuality; “the last thing she wants to be is a 1950s style nag.” 

For those who accept defeat in the contest to be Supermom, there is consolation in the works of D. W. Winnicott, a 1950s psychoanalyst who developed a concept of the “good enough” mother.  Tsing Loh finds that Winnicott’s “good enough” mother is “actually pretty close to perfect.”  

Supermom is devoted to her children; so devoted, in fact, that she is racked with guilt if she suspects that she loves their father more than she loves them.  This, to Tsing Loh’s disappointment, is why Ayelet Waldman titles her memoir Bad Mother.  While Tsing Loh fears that she is a bad mother because she left her husband for another man, Waldman fears that she is a bad mother because she can’t keep her hands off her husband, her children’s biological father.  Tsing Loh says that this isn’t so crazy; after all, “The very success of the modern American family- where kids get punctually to SAT tutoring classes, the mortgage gets paid, the second-story remodel stays on budget- surely depends on spouses not being in love.”  Being in love simply takes up too much time and attention to meet all of Supermom’s, or for that matter Superdad’s, obligations. 

This is where it becomes crucial that “You are not enough people.”  Not only are spouses dissatisfied with a marriage that only gives them one more person to talk to, and that person a member of the opposite sex, but children are dissatisfied too.  Without grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, all under the same roof, they direct all their demands to their parents.  Without their own parents, siblings, in-laws, nieces and nephews, parents direct all of their aspirations to their children.  Because each person is only one person, nothing parent or child does can satisfy the other’s need for a bigger group.  What the parents do have to offer is chauffeur service, fees for tutoring, and entry into structured activities led by adults who wear whistles around their necks.  What the children have to offer is the good opinion of such adults.  These goods can only for a moment quiet the longing for a larger kinship group, and so each side demands ever more of them.  The two beleaguered parents insist on providing ever more education to their children; they pride themselves on it, to the point where it becomes inconceivable for them not to judge other parents based on the lengths to which they have gone in playing this particular game.

For the next time somebody calls “no do-overs.”

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