Month: March 2023

Categories
albums

Verve // Unmixed

Artist
Various Artists
Realse Date
April 30, 2002

I bought the Verve // Unmixed [discogs.com] in late 2002 or early 2003 while living in DuPont Circle in Washington, DC. I got it at the little music store near Kramer books. I bought a lot of Jazz around this time. When I was in Europe I went to a lot of old Jazz bars, including Le Bilboquet in Paris or Ronnie Scott’s in London when I could afford them and in many, many smaller places all over Europe that I never even knew the name of. Little basements in Paris and Prague, upstairs rooms in Florence and Barcelona. I don’t know where I picked up this jazz bug, but I was into it.

When I came back to the US, while I was job hunting I watched Ken Burns Jazz [pbs.org] on TV at my parents house. Jazz is, like, 19 hours long, and almost entirely about jazz from before I was born; Louie Armstrong and Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, John Caltrain and many more. It was a great introduction to the history of jazz and the golden age from 1920s up to the late 1960s.

This is all to say that I was into jazz and, especially older jazz styles at the time I stumbled across the Verve // Unmixed CD. So an album of classic jazz from the Verve [wikipedia.org], who’s back catalog of jazz is second to none sounded like an extrodonarly good idea.

I immediately fell in love with it. Some of the songs a I knew already while some were new to me. It’s an eclectic mix of songs and styles, starting with “Spanish Grease” and ending with “Hari Krishna”. In between it spends time in New York with “See-Line Woman” and Brazil on “Who Needs Forever”.

This mix is, apparently, not for everyone. I read one review in preparing for writing this where the reviewer was saying that the album lacks any sort of coherent theme or vision and that the transitions between songs are jarring. They conclude that the album is less than the sum of it’s parts dispite the amazing songs on it. I could not disagree more. The album is not a meditation on a specific style or concept or artist, it’s a survey of some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time spanning the golden age if jazz.

The most potent song on the album is the penultimate song, Billie Holiday’s take on “Strange Fruit”. It’s just stunning. Holiday’s vocals are filled with pain and the muted horns are crying as she describes the horrific scene of a lynching. When you listen to the lyrics, you think “this song shouldn’t be beautiful”, but it is, it’s so achingly beautiful. If you really listen to the lyrics it’s going to haunt you but the singing and playing is so beautiful that you’ll come back to it again and again.

The great women of jazz are on full display on the album: In addition to “Strange Fruit”, Billie Holiday gets another amazing track, “Don’t Explain”. There are also two tracks from Nina Simone, “See-Line Woman” which I already mentioned and her legendary take on “Feelin’ Good”. Then there is Carmen McRae’s “How Long Has This Been Going On?”, Sara Vaughan’s “Summertime” and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Wait ‘Til You See Him”. Most of the songs on this album are “jazz standards” that have been performed by countless artists over the years but these are the gold standard versions of these standards.

The core of the album, between (excluding the first track, “Spanish Grease” and the last two “Strange Fruit” and “Hari Krishna”) cast a spell on me every time I listen to it. “How Long Has This Been Going On”, “Summertime”, “See-Line Woman”, “Feelin’ Good” and “Don’t Explain” transport me to another time and place. A place I could never have actually been. They transport me to the sweaty jazz clubs of the Harlem Renascence. In my minds eye, I see the grainy black and white photos of 1920’s Harlem that are in Ken Burn’s Jazz, and I imagine the music coming from the basement clubs. At the same time scenes from the Harlem of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man [confusion.cc] play out in my mind. Invisible Man, made a huge impression on me, and I read it and re-read it at about the same time, first in London and later in Washington, DC. It’s a novel that reminds me, every time I read it, of the evil of mankind but the resilience of people, the people what made this music.

It’s funny that I also associate these songs, sometimes, with a vision of Paris between the world wars. A vision I got from reading Jean Paul Satre’s The Age of Reason [confusion.cc] (don’t click on that, god that review is shit, on paragraph for a book I loved, note to self: rewrite that shit.) A significant portion of The Age of Reason takes place in a smokey jazz part in Paris. When I visited Paris in the early 2000’s I visited The Club St. Germain one of the original clubs. It was no longer in the basement, having moved upstairs into Le Bilboquet, at bit more of a restaurant. But the original club was one of the premier post-war jazz spots in Paris, in all of Europe. When I sat there I thought about Satre’s characters sitting in the same spots.

In my research for this post, I see that Le Bilboquet closed and has reopened in a different location in the years since. So, the one real place I sat listening to jazz that this album transports me to, is like the Harlem of Invisible man or Ken Burn’s Jazz, a place in memory only. At least the music lives on.

Did I convince you this album is worth listening to? Listen to it on Apple Music:

Or listen on Spotify:

Categories
ranting

The sea turtle’s death

We went to Desaru during the school holidays. Just a couple of days to relax before the next term begins for the girls. We stayed at a resort on the beach, but the waves were to violent to do any swimming in the sea.

I walked along the beach just before sunset one day and a few hundred meters down the shore from the resort I saw a monitor lizard walking up the beach towards the jungle. He was a bit far off but I took my phone out to video him as I walked closer. As I was watching him, still a hundred meters away I notice a large shape on the beach.

It wasn’t a rock; there are lots of jagged black rocks out in the surf alone Desaru beach but this was too round. In the shadows it took me a few moments to figure out what it was. It was a sea turtle. A big one. A few seconds later I figured out the only reason a monitor lizard would be there was it must be dead. The tide was combing in and I guess the lizard didn’t want to eat in the surf.

As I got closer I could see how bloated the creature was. I was surprised it didn’t smell. I was up wind but even up close, where I could see it was missing its eyes and the softer skin of it’s face was mostly gone, eaten or rotted off, I didn’t smell it. I got a few whiffs of it when I moved down wind, but it wasn’t that smelly.

I wonder what killed it. There was no obvious thing. I’m not an expert but there was no holes —other than where the eyes and one fin had been eaten. I wonder if we killed it? Did it eat one too many plastic bags? Maybe it died of old age, it was very large, but, maybe I’m too pessimistic I suspect humans until proven otherwise. The beach was littered with bottles and other bits of plastic, covered in small clam like creatures. This is on a beach at a resort that is raked every morning. There was a shoe, and further down the beach an insole. I wonder if they go together? Humans suck. And all of this trash has been in the past century. We are disgusting creatures who can’t control ourselves.

Human trash washed up on Desaru beach

It is changing, slowly. Slower than a glacier moves, and much slower than all the glaciers are melting because of us. Singapore, which should be able to be way out front on such things can’t even get there. Almost all take away containers are plastic, delivery makes it worse, everything is wrapped in plastic and then bagged in plastic and comes with plastic utensils and straws and little plastic packets of condiments you won’t use. Even when you chose the “don’t need cutlery” they sometimes include it. Even if they do leave it out they will throw in more ketchup and chili than you could use. If you get take out from many food stalls you get styrofoam. Something McDonalds stopped using when I was a kid is still the standard for many takeout places in Singapore.

The Singapore government could outlaw this, but I guess it would inconvenience people, maybe they would vote against the government, and for sure there are a number of local companies that make all this plastic —I see their trucks on the road sometimes, with pictures of all the plastics and saying things like “manufacturer of all kinds of plastic food containers!”. Yea, the government should help them move on to other work and cancel the plastic. I remember more than a decade ago being in Taiwan and seeing that all the takeout was in cardboard boxed that were waxed to resist the liquids at least long enough to get home and eat. How come Taiwan can do it and Singapore cannot? Singapore can do better, and should. Many stores have started to charge for plastic bags but few people are carrying their own bags regularly or reusable food containers. For a place were tiffins were once ubiquitous it’s sad, everything is double and triple packed in single use plastic today.

Categories
quotes ranting

Cultured Meat is Vegan

If [vegans] want to see an end to animal exploitation, it is our moral duty to call lab-grown meat vegan, even if it unnerves us.

Jude Whiley [wired.com], from Yes, Lab-Grown Meat Is Vegan [wired.com] on Wired

It’s a good article, go and read it. I agree. The author writes better than me and his almost all the points I can thing of in a relativly short article. Seriously, go read it. I’ll wait.

I’m not a vegan, I tried that briefly —too hard to be practical for me— but I am a vegetarian, have been for close to 25 years now. More than half my life. I came to vegetarianism and the concept of animal liberation through utilitarian ethics. Reading Animal Liberation [confusion.cc] was one part of my journey, though I think Practical Ethics [confusion.cc] was more important in my journey. Maybe that speaks to why I couldn’t commit to to being vegan.

Vegan vs. vegetarian discussions aside, I’m in complete alignment with the key points to the article:

First, vegans, and vegetarians, should be 100% behind lab grown, or cultured, meat. The idea that lab grown meat is bad because cells had to be harvested from an animal is kinda self defeating, if you want to save animals from slaughter. If the goal is to eliminate the slaughter, or even the wider exploitation of animals then a few cows having a biopsy should be an acceptable evil to prevent millions of cows from being born into exploitation and slaughter. To hope that humans will have an epiphany and realize the equality of animals is farfetched. Too many vegans are ‘religious’ about things and think that it has to be black and white. Even if a vegan chooses not to eat lab grown meat they should support others eating it to limit the cruelty and explotation.

Second, lab grown meat should be a thing unto itself, sold as lab grown not used as some sort of cheaper filler combined with uncultured meat, to make it cheaper or increase the profitability of meat. Today lab grown meat is much more expensive than farmed meat, but that will change and, if allowed, companies will ‘cut’ farmed meat with lab grown meat like drug dealers cut cocaine or heroin. And they will try to hide that fact with marketing speak and labeling shenanigans so people not looking for lab grown meat will buy it.

We should normalize lab grown meat as meat, all the tasty tasty without the murder.

At this point I should note that despite living in Singapore, which was the first country to legalize cultured meat, I have not actually tried it. It’s currently only available at a single restaurant that requires reservations and blah blah blah… I can’t be bothered. Hopefully it will be available more places and in the grocery store soon.

The author does miss two important points. First, how will people who are vegan or vegetarian for actual religious reasons see lab grown meat? It’s much more interesting than how the vegan society and its’ members will see it. Second, he notes:

[A]nimal abolitionists, who sit at the radical end of veganism, argue against lab-grown meat on the basis that it is speciesist. Speciesism states that humans place themselves above other animals as more important, and that this bias leads to all forms of animal exploitation, from burger consumption to greyhound racing. Vegans who worry about speciesism contest that the eating of meat grown from animal cells—even if no animals are slaughtered—still upholds a belief that animals are “something to eat” in a way that humans are not.

But I beg to differ, lab grown meat can eliminate specimen. We can eat humans. There are already companies selling this idea. The Soylent Vats are Coming [confusion.cc]…