unfussy backbeats

 

Well now we're respected in society

We don't worry about the things that we used to be...

______________________________

        Last week I was sadly surprised to read that the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts had died.

------------------------------- [excerpts from article in The Guardian] ---------------------------------------- With his limber stance, keen knowledge of jazz, and unruffled ability to make songs swing even when keeping the strictest time, Watts is regarded as one of the greatest -- and most stylish -- rock drummers of all time....

        Born in 1941, Watts was raised in Wembley, north-west London, and later the suburb of Kingsbury.  His first musical love was US jazz from the swing and bebop eras, drumming along with jazz records after getting his first kit in his mid-teens.  He later attended art school and became a graphic designer after graduation, playing in local bands on the side.

        In 1962 he joined Blues Incorporated, a linchpin band in the British rhythm and blues scene led by Alexis Korner, playing alongside the Cream bassist Jack Bruce and more, in a fluid lineup.  Through Korner he met Brian Jones, who would play at Blues Incorporated gigs, and they found regular fans in Jagger and Richards, who also ended up playing with the group.

Jagger, Richards and Jones soon formed their own group, the Rolling Stones, with Watts joining in 1963.  "It was another band to join, I was in about three of them," Watts later said....

        Always using a straightforward four-drum setup -- positively minimalist compared with the multi-instrument setups favoured by many rock groups -- he gave the Rolling Stones propulsive, unfussy backbeats on every one of their studio albums, beginning with their self-titled 1964 debut.  

"I don't like drum solos," he once said.  "I admire some people that do them, but generally I prefer drummers playing with the band.  The challenge with rock'n'roll is the regularity of it.  My thing is to make it a dance sound -- it should swing and bounce."

...The band went on to epitomise stadium rock'n'roll -- though Watts regarded them as a "blues band" -- scoring 13 UK No 1 albums including the critically adored likes of Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street.  Watts helped to power their high-energy world tours, playing with the group well into his  mid-70s -- his final tour was the two-year No Filter tour, beginning in 2017.

Alongside the Rolling Stones, Watts also played jazz in a series of groups over the years, including his own quintet and tentet, and Rocket 88, reuniting with Korner and Bruce in the late 1970s to play boogie-woogie....

...Other artists paying tribute include Robbie Robertson of The Band, who said:  "Charlie's drumming is powerful and unique.  His approach is entirely his own and helped shape the sound of rock'n'roll."  Paul Stanley of Kiss called Watts "one of the true timeless icons and the backbone of the Stones.  Hard to fathom the loss."

        Joan Jett said Watts was "the most elegant and dignified drummer in rock'n'roll.  He played exactly what was needed -- no more, no less.  He is one of a kind."  

Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine called him "one of the greatest and most important architects of the music we love ... Rock'n'roll would not be rock'n'roll without the rhythm, the style, the vibe of this incredible  musician."  

Questlove, drummer with the Roots, called him "the heartbeat of rock'n'roll".

_________________________________

article title:

"Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts dies aged 80"

written by Ben Beaumont-Thomas

____________________________________

On You Tube, dance to "Respectable" by the Rolling Stones...!

Well now you're a pillar of society...

-30-

descent into darkness

 

Kurt Vonnegut, American novelist

1922 - 2007

book:  Prisoners of Time

written by Christopher Clark

reviewed by Andrew Anthony in

The Guardian

(August 10, 2021)

reader comments

___________________________

                           I'd recommend these three books in sequence to see how eerily familiar is America's possible descent into darkness:  

Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner; 

I Shall Bear Witness by Victor Klemperer; and 

My Opposition by Friedrich Kellner.  

        These are all diaries kept by ordinary, literate civilians and give a stunning insight into how it felt to live through the lies, propaganda, violence and horror that slowly, inexorably overwhelmed a once civilized population.  

And Biden seems unable or unwilling to get a voting rights act through Congress.  If he doesn't, and before November next year, I fear there's no way back.

_______________________________

                        Thank you for these recommendations.

___________________________

                   Trump isn't really an aspirational dictator, not at his age, just a poisonous old man, it is his sons I'm worried about....Heaven help the US, the world, if either of them gets elected.

____________________________

                       "There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it.  This is it:  Only nut cases want to be president."

Kurt Vonnegut

------------------------- [end / Reader Comments]

__________________________________________

__________________________________________

On You Tube there is a video titled

"Day of Rage:  How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol."

uploader:  The New York Times.

It's about a half hour:  it takes you inside the events of January 6th--it's pretty interesting and evocative of the experience.

One comment under the video reads:

---------------------- See what ONE conman can do with a bunch of delusional people?  And those who know me thought I was over doing it when I pointed out that was exactly how Hitler did what he did. ---------------------- [end of comment]

Congressman Paul Gosar, R-Arizona

Congressman Matt Gaetz, R-Florida

and Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin

appear in the video, saying stuff like, "it wasn't anything, it was just tourists visiting the capitol" ... these guys are gaslighting the American people.  

If William F. Buckley were here, he would kick these people and others like them out of the Republican Party, pronto.

-30-  

a harmless lark

 

book:  Prisoners of Time

written by Christopher Clark

reviewed by Andrew Anthony in

The Guardian

(August 10, 2021)

reader comments

___________________________________

                                I think you are right.  I think there is a widespread tendency in the West, where we take our freedoms of thought and expression, and freedoms of political action for granted, to fail to recognise and grasp the experience of the lived history of vast numbers of people not from the West, who have never experienced democracy, 

or what passes for democracy, who have experienced instability and upheaval that make even the simple things of day to day living precarious and uncertain, and who have been actively discouraged and where they will know the personal penalties for dissent.

Most people don't want to put their heads above the parapet but prefer to learn to live quietly.

I have a friend who was born, went to school, worked, and lived in the USSR, until its demise.

Still, 30 years later, my friend is unwilling to engage in political discussion.  Not because they can't or has no thoughts, but because the habit of keeping one's head down, maintaining stability of home, income, life, still persists.

I sometimes say to them that expressing thoughts now won't lead to the gulag!

___________________________________

                        This person said that "most people want stability", without offering evidence.

Most Western societies no longer have a cultural memory of lawless anarchy and the horrors that attend it.  The breakdown of trade.  Hunger and famine.  The countryside abandoned to outlaws and private armies.  Running mob violence in the streets.

This is what the absence of powerful authority means to much of the world.  Forfeiting a hefty measure of freedom in exchange for the security of a tyrant is a tradeoff humans have proven willing to make over and over again.

______________________________

                                   But my reply to that and to others who have made similar points is that it's democracies that abhor war, not strongmen who frequently unleash war or maintain war.  

Furthermore I wouldn't call them stable even at peace.  

The arbitrary nature of a strongman's rule cannot lead to a good night's sleep, in my view.  

What if your primary school kids unwittingly let slip an innocent but open-to-interpretation remark that was made at home?...What if the factory boss doesn't give the promotion deserved?  How do you refuse to do something unsavoury on the orders of the boss?  

Freedom for many U.K. citizens is more recent than many know.  

My grandad as a property-less working class man didn't get the vote until 1918 when he was in his thirties after four years on the western front.  

Authoritarian regimes are never really stable and they are always, always deeply sinister, whether it's Gaddafi, Putin, Xi or Lukashenko.  Real people cannot live an authentic fulfilling life under such conditions.

__________________________________________

                            Indeed.  And I long predicted trouble when the last of the WW2 generation died out:  the people who knew what it felt like to be hungry, cold and frightened and still had the stink of burnt-out cities and decomposition in their nostrils.  

Three entire generations have now grown up - in the west at least - in societies with material plenty and the rule of law, so can't conceive of a state where neither of those exist.  

This makes them ready to flirt with authoritarians 

who promise to keep them in the manner to which they have become accustomed, because blowing up the system by installing a Trump [Donald in America] or a Johnson [Boris in UK] seems like a harmless lark which can't possibly have long-term consequences for them personally.  

            It's no accident that for four decades, until the year before last, Spain was the only country in Europe not to have a significant far-Right populist party.  

People who had grown up under the Franco dictatorship knew that such regimes are far from pleasant to live under and intrude into your life in all manner of ways:  

for example, never going to law with someone who is a Party member if you aren't, because you'll lose your case for sure, or having your salary mulcted without your consent to put up another statue to the Supreme Leader, "funded by voluntary donations".  But they'll only find that out when it's too late....

______________________________________

                            I'll be buying this book and thinking of aspiring dictators like Trump while I read it.  Because I don't think America is over its fascist problem yet.

________________________________

                                         Nor is the UK.

____________________________

                              Because I don't think America is over its fascist problem yet.

In truth the USA has had a 'fascist problem' lurking just beneath the surface virtually since the day the nation was founded (although it's obviously gone by different names).  It's unlikely to disappear any time soon...

_______________________________

                         The whole human race has got a 'fascist problem'.  Luckily, millions of individuals who have naturally fascistic thought patterns don't join fascist organisations or seek power, they just have an outlook on life that accords with fascism.  Unfortunately, many of those millions don't even realise that they are fascistic in outlook, they just think it is normal.

This is why so many are willing to consent to the rise of a powerful orator who 'talks like them' and 'says it how it is'.  

Fascism is a problem of the human condition, not only America.  The biggest problem is the normalisation of the Fascistic mind frame that runs through all cultures.  The war against Fascism is never ending and takes constant vigilant awareness of what it is and where it comes from to prevent it from defeating democracy.

Fascism is capable of insidiously usurping democracy, in the name of democracy.  That is a massive threat to America itself.

____________________________

                           It's all but baked in.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

-30-

loot

 

U.S. President Nixon trip to China, 1972

Book:  Prisoners of Time

written by Christopher Clark

reviewed by Andrew Anthony in

The Guardian

(August 10, 2021)

reader comments

__________________________________

                         I've mostly thought that there are two main factors at work in China.  One is that the country has never experienced anything remotely resembling democracy and it is certainly plausible that many may have a fear, gratefully encouraged by the government, of the instability it might bring.  

The other, of course, is that there has been a huge improvement in living standards for most people in the country over the last four decades.  The obvious question is, to what degree did that improvement depend on the appalling tyranny of the government - could it have happened in a democracy.  

I suspect many Chinese think not.  

But those two factors are intertwined because the government has to keep the economic plates spinning at all costs to maintain their otherwise non-existent legitimacy and must fear that environmental and world economic factors could destroy it, hence their need for ever increasing levels of tyranny, along with constantly stoked nationalism as a distraction.

________________________________

                                  "And why do so many who should know better go along with the unhindered concentration of power in one person?"

I think the short (and overly simplistic) answer is a combination of genetics and laziness.

Humanity has been genetically programmed to follow alpha behaviours (it confers organisational advantage and thus has been bred in) and they can't be bothered to think about difficult things, so they'd rather outsource it to someone who sounds like they know what they're talking about.

Step forward the charismatic "strong man" type.  With inevitable consequences.

___________________________

                             'Step forward the charismatic strong man type.  With inevitable consequences.'

A succinct summing up of a conclusion reached by Plato, Aristotle and Polybius.  Two millennia later we are still struggling to deal with it.

___________________________________

                                                 I think most people do want stability, largely as a matter of individual psychology - most people are more comfortable with the familiar and the predictable, even where that may be authoritarian and even though they don't like it, because they can then know how to navigate their lives through the authoritarianism.

This is particularly true IMO in those countries which have a history of instability and uncertainty, and where the population know from long experience how to survive authoritarian governments, and where day to day life for the majority can feel very precarious financially.  Yes they do consent, but not because they want to, but because they have no alternative if they want a quiet life and to see their families survive.

People want the certainty of knowing they have a home, a job, and income, however paltry it is.  People will put up with all the oppression and indignities, if that is not threatened.  Or to put it another way, they will not be inclined to upset the status quo for fear of losing what little they may currently have.  Hence the ability of countries like Belarus and Russia to persist with authoritarianism.

                    Lukashenko, for instance, will know that for all the protest of dissidents, so long as the state continues to pay pensions to older people and offer certainty of homes and jobs, there is unlikely to be any major kick back sufficient to topple him, and therefore he can repress with impunity.

        It is quite striking, that in comparison with the west, how apolitical most people are in Eastern Europe and how 'accommodating' they are of corrupt and failing politicians.  Having lived for many years as part of the USSR, even now people's memories, including folk memories, of how to survive, are very strong and persistent.  Including being unwilling to even talk privately in their own homes about political matters.

Of course, this is not the whole story.  It does not explain why some people enthusiastically embrace authoritarianism, for example.  But the inertia generated by the need to survive in large parts of the population, does go a long way, IMO, to explain why authoritarian regimes persist, and why they are able to find the space to prosper and extend their power.

__________________________________

                                                 "Economic stagnation is fairly strongly linked to the rise of reactionary ideas."  

And we've had 40 years of a system that prides itself on making normal people's lives feel insecure while siphoning off the loot to a tiny elite.

***********************************************

-30-

hours are like diamonds

 

Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones' drummer

-----------------------------------------------------------------

The Guardian

book review of

Christopher Clark's Prisoners of Time

review by Andrew Anthony

another reader comment:

________________________________

                                     An endlessly fascinating subject.  And why do so many who should know better go along with the unhindered concentration of power in one person?  

Even last week the Economist published a letter from an American man complaining about the paper's critical coverage of increasingly authoritarian China.  This person said that "most people want stability," without offering evidence.  

But does authoritarianism give us stability?  

I think the opposite.  

It gives us the unbearable stress of living in an arbitrary regime where even the most lowly don't know the boundaries and can be unwittingly undone by crossing them.  

Democracy is messy and really annoying but if the rules are adhered to it offers the chance of fulfillment.  

For me the scariest thing right now is the number of people in democratic countries who seem willing to bend the rules to ensure continued power right through to those who would countenance authoritarian take over.  

They range from the cowardly to the downright evil and dangerous and they are out there.

-30-

minority rule?

 

more reader comments on the Guardian article

_______________________________

______________________

                          Nazis, communists, or fascists appeal at most to 30 - 40 % of the population.  They wouldn't get an absolute majority in a functional democracy.  Hitler never got such a majority in a free election; he gained power through flaws in the political system and a rigged referendum (sounds familiar?).   

Any political system that allows a party to gain an absolute majority on a minority of the vote is in danger of being taken over by extremists.  In this regard, the UK and the US, with their FPTP system, are accidents waiting to happen.

________________________________________

                           Agree completely, especially about the voting systems in the UK and US - both completely out of date and undemocratic.  

Having investigated numerous industrial safety incidents etc., over the years I've come to the conclusion that many of the dramatic things that one sees are what I would call 'Black Swan' events, i.e. they come out of nowhere and bite you on the bum.  

It's only when you review the incident that you think, 'well, that was obvious.'  It's the same with fascism, one saw the signs, ignored them, ignored them again and then 1933, or in the case of the US, 2016 and again in 2019.  The signs were there and were ignored.

____________________________________

                                                          And yet the history of Athenian democracy suggests that in free votes an absolute majority will support violently radical and morally reprehensible proposals at times of crisis / panic.

_______________________________

                                In relation to Blaskowitz it sounds like an example of the Creeps, Cynics and Crazies theory of organisations.  The Creeps get control by telling the Crazies (who are always in the majority) what they want to hear, but it's the Cynics who make an organisation run.  The trouble is that the Crazies' support for the Creeps limits the Cynics' ability to stop the Creeps.

-30-

brilliance and greatness and jackboots, oh my

 

"Berlin Street Scene" by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

On August 10th The Guardian published an article about a new history book.

The book:  Prisoners of Time, by Christopher Clark

The review is written by Andrew Anthony.

some reader comments:

_______________________________

                                   What is more interesting is why civil organs such as judges were appropriated into suspending the Rule of Law and hence to look the "other way".

One of the most fatal errors of the Weimar Republic was not carrying out, from its very earliest years, a gradual but comprehensive clean-out of the German judiciary and civil service which it had inherited from the Kaiser.  

For the sake of continuity and not rocking the boat the great majority of judges in 1930 had also been in place before 1918, and exercised their authority with quite scandalous partiality, far-Right terrorists routinely being acquitted or given derisory sentences for crimes which would lead their far-Left equivalents to the guillotine or life imprisonment.  

        This culture of one-sided impunity was instrumental in bringing about the Republic's collapse in 1931-32; so it's profoundly alarming to see something very similar now in place in the United States, where it seems to be a given that if you're an ex-President or one of his senior associates, then gross abuse of public office and attempted armed overthrow of the state are entirely understandable and no cause whatever for further action.  

        This is very dangerous territory to be getting into, and future generations may come to view January's attack on the Capitol as Trump's Beer-Hall Putsch, an apparently-farcical episode which in fact provided many useful lessons on how to do it better next time.

____________________________________

                                To some extent a 'just get on with it tendency' helps would-be dictators cement their grip on states.  There was a time when the nazis were not universally applauded in Germany.  To some, they represented the future for a Germany badly affected by the First World War.  

To others they represented a bulwark against soviet communist expansionism.  

But to some others, those either disinterested or who felt themselves powerless, it was just another development to be accommodated, and from which to 'make the best of a bad hand'.  Those who would attend rallies, etc, so that they wouldn't stand out from their neighbours, until everything became normalised and habitual.

To a degree some see that tendency in Johnson's UK where moves to reduce the opportunity to challenge the state are underway.  It's not nazism, but it could possibly be the start of a slippery slope.

A sobering thought:  when concentration camps were evacuated as the war in Europe drew to a close, civilian populations feared that the camp inmates would escape and murder everyone because they were anti social elements who had been locked away for the public good.  

Many saw the deprivations as being what the inmates deserved.  

Such was the power of the propaganda and the implicit trust in the state to know how best to protect the people.  It took some time for ordinary Germans to realise how they had been deceived.  

___________________________

                          Fascism is essentially one long hard-luck story; of how naturally superior people were somehow brought low by their inferiors, through weight of numbers and/or treachery within their own ranks, but must now straighten their backs and get even with the dirty rotters by whatever means are necessary.  

The best definition that I've ever come across of this diffuse and often-puzzling phenomenon is "The revolt of the losers".  Self-pity is intrinsic to it.

________________________

                                         It's also why some countries seemed in the 20th century - indeed in some cases still seem - to have a natural inclination towards fascism whereas others don't.  

On the one hand you have the reduced-circumstances one like Hungary or Poland or Spain which were once a great deal bigger and more important but fell upon hard times; while there were also the frustrated-expectations ones like Germany, Italy and Japan which aspired to greatness but believed that they were being held back by various malign conspiracies against them.  

But others appeared pretty well immune to it.  Ireland was the only Catholic country in Europe not to have gone Fascist by 1940, which was of course partly because its disgruntled national minority had been segregated off into a statelet of its own, but also because of the sheer implausibility of the lost-greatness narrative.  

Eoin O'Duffy and his Blueshirts yelling 'Make Ireland great again!" were figures of fun precisely because everyone knew that it never had been great, and moreover that if the Ireland of 1935 wasn't too brilliant the Ireland of 1835 had been a great deal worse.

Anyway, the United States and Britain now seem irrevocably to have joined the lost-greatness countries:  so expect some interesting times ahead as they flail around trying to recreate a past that never was.

____________________________________

                                             The storming of the US Capitol in January is a clear sign that the threat of aggressive right-wing populism is not yet over in America....

  

-30-