Thoughts in Progress

In Denzel Washington’s latest film, as both actor and director, there is an unusual supporting character. Fences features a baseball hanging by a thin rope in the back garden of the house shared by Washington’s Troy, his wife Rose (played by Viola Davis) and their son Cory (Jovan Adepo).  Though inanimate, this ball serves as a witness to all the tribulations of this black family in post-war US. Hit every which way by Troy and his son Cory, this baseball is also a metaphor for how we shape our lives and how far we can go in determining our own destiny.

To me this baseball also reminded me of the recent US election. Before you close down your browser sending my post in the process to the land of oblivion, I would like you to give me a few minutes of your time. I am fully aware that we are all now pretty Trumped-out (his latest press conference being a case in point. How low can the guy go? Well, you ain’t seen the bottom yet, I suppose). The dust has now settled. To quote Leonard Cohen: “Everybody knows the good guys lost/Everybody knows the fight was fixed/The poor stay poor, the rich get rich”. Except that it was not a good guy who lost but a woman.

It would be arrogant of me to attempt to figure out why Hillary Clinton lost to a misogynist, racist, sexist and xenophobe. Plenty of opinion pieces have been churned out since November. But what I cannot stop thinking about is the reasons why her manifesto might not have struck a chord with most voters. To recap, Clinton lost the election, but won the popular vote. You could say that electoral changes are needed urgently in the US and you would be right. Yet, that would be like trying to hit that ball in Troy’s garden out of the park. That ball ain’t going nowhere.  It’s still hanging on a rope.

Team Clinton bashed out a series of proposals and ideas that they thought would capture the public’s imagination. Overall, I thought, sitting comfortably on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, that they banked more on the Trump’s machine imploding than they themselves causing their explosion. Wrong. When your opponent realises that the ball you’re hitting is not moving, they grow stronger, not weaker. In order to get at Trump team Clinton had to untie that baseball and play real ball with it.

That would have meant casting your net much wider, beyond identity politics. I will not delve deep into identity politics in this post because I am in the process of drafting one up on the left and the case for/against identity politics.  The truth is, however, that Clinton got caught up in a feminist/multicultural/gay-friendly agenda. Nothing wrong with that. But what is eating most Americans right now is where the next dime is going to come from.

When Barack Obama entered office in 2009, one of his first actions was to summon the top banking executives. Remember that this was post-2008-crisis and Wall Street was on its knees. The usual villains, politicians, had been given a short-lived respite, to be replaced by bankers. At that point president Obama could have asked for the moon to be delivered on a silver plate and every single person in the room would have coughed up enough money for a space expedition leaving the next day. But Barack dithered and bankers smelled blood. Instead of the far-reaching economic reforms that were needed then, all bankers got was a slap on the wrist and, guess what, within a couple of years, the multi-million-pound bonuses made a comeback.

This was the financial situation Clinton inherited as the Democrat front-runner. Never mind the fact that under Obama more jobs were created than during Bush’s eight-year reign. Never mind that Obamacare became an immediate safeguard for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of families. The crux of the matter was still, a lot of rich people were getting richer and poor people poorer. Obama, for all his credentials as a liberal and the hope he represented, explicitly stated in that strikingly beautiful poster (remember?) was seen as part of the same machinery that had ceded ground to China and had allowed Putin’s Russia to start calling the shots on the international stage.

By the time Clinton entered the frame, the electorate was jaded. Cynical voters are the toughest to turn around, especially if one of the candidates comes from what could be assumed to be a dynasty (Bill Clinton served two terms as president. Chelsea Clinton has already been discussed as a possible candidate for 2024 or 2028). It was not Clinton’s fault that the election went to Donald. It was, as I said at the start, a combination of factors. One of them was the Democrats focusing on policies that might have gone down well with the already-converted but did very little to enthuse the fence-sitters, the refuseniks, the hard-to-reach.

Donald Trump is not infallible and he definitely is not unbeatable. I seriously doubt he will be re-elected in 2020. But, and this is an important “but”, for the Democrats to win the White House again, they will have to untie that baseball and take it to places where they are rarely seen, engaging voters whom they barely know or whose views they disparage. Clinton got the vote of mainly poor, young, Latin and black women (four different categories in themselves).  Trump’s camp was the beneficiary of chiefly white women from a working-class background and rural areas.

An average baseball game lasts nine innings. We are barely in the bottom of the first. Hitting a baseball on a string makes good practice but it is not the real game. The real game is won by the team with most runs. Already team Trump has made a few gaffes. What Democrats need to do now is to capitalise on those players who have reached base. What’s the next step: steal or sacrifice bunt, or both? How about going for the big swing? Whatever happens, it is about putting runs on that scoreboard. Untie that baseball and hit it hard. Just hit it as hard as you can.

© 2017

Next Post: “Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts”, to be published on Wednesday 22^nd February at 6pm (GMT)

Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

This is my last post before my customary summer break. When thinking of what to write today the words of Melvyn Bragg in a recent article in the New Statesman came to mind: “The rituals of walking are few but often seem essential. The garb, the route, the recognition of old favourites – trees, prospects, rivers. Once you are in the rhythm of those rituals what happens, to me at any rate, is that a non-self takes over. A non-drug-induced drift. And an expanding sense of inner freedom. And there are the inklings of sensations. Intimations? Shapes that could become thoughts that do not seem to obey mechanical laws. Maybe in time we will see that in fact they do. Maybe everything we feel will be settled by mathematics. But what if not? Might the known unknown of the universe and the brain surprise us all? And will we then lose this invaluable feeling of inner liberty?”

I’ve included the whole paragraph to provide a bit of context. Writer, broadcaster and veteran presenter of the long-running South Bank Show (for those who don’t know who he is) Melvyn Bragg was musing about rituals, prayers, God and religion. He was, at the time of writing this article, in Cumbria. North West England. There were other submissions as well. From former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to philosopher Julian Baggini, contributors (and contributions) were varied and thought-provoking. It was Melvyn’s column, though, that really got to me.

The Big Ben: you don't need drugs to appreciate its beauty

I recognise that state he described. I have been under the influence of that “rhythm” he pondered over. My “non-self” has come out a few times as well. I call this the “gear” moment. As in all the “gears” slotting into place, well-oiled, fully functional, forward-motion gears, propelling, whatever device they are part of, onwards. Also, in my case like Melvyn’s, this is a “non-drug-induced” experience. Who needs drugs to appreciate David Gilmour’s guitar solo at the beginning of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, or the rich Cornish coastal landscape, or the majestic Big Ben, in the early evening after a whole day of rain in the company of someone you care about? Who needs drugs?

This is transcendence, not in a pantheistic way, but in a human one. As I mentioned before, the column Melvyn penned was part of a bigger debate on how we supposedly fill this “faith-shaped hole in modern life”. Whatever your take on God, religion and the like (and there are many, luckily), what can’t and shouldn’t be denied is that the moments Mr Bragg described above begin and end in the person, the human.

An anecdote is called for here to explain my line of thought. Almost a month ago the teacher of an Afro-Brazilian class in north London which I had been attending, rang me up out of the blue. He was stranded in Greece and needed someone to cover his workshop that night. I must admit that I felt flattered to be asked as up to then I had been only a student and found him to be a very engaging, knowledgeable and skilful tutor. He told me that I could work with the two percussionists who normally play in the class. Already this posed a challenge. Although Africa gave Brazil and Cuba similar cultures our dance traditions are very different. Throughout the day I could hardly concentrate on my work. My mind was on the workshop I was meant to deliver that night.

I took a gamble. I chose a type of dance from the extensive Afro-Cuban repertoire that resembled somewhat some of the moves this teacher had taught before and which could be executed without much difficulty by the two drummers. At the same time I added my own spin. After meeting and agreeing with the musicians on what rhythm they were going to play I felt more confident to go ahead with the idea I had in mind. It’s good to work with professionals who know what they are doing and these two drummers were top class. I began the warm-up.

After a few stretching and abdominal exercises with yogic influences, I asked the students to close their eyes and to stay where they were. I, then, went up to each of them and gave them the same instructions one by one, individually: Keep your eyes closed, don’t open your eyes, I want you to move to the music you are hearing now on the spot. I don’t care about technique, experience or anything, just move on the spot, move in whatever way you are feeling the music because this is your music, nobody else’s, it’s yours, you own it, so you dance it, you move to it. It was a full house, twenty plus students, but the “gears” were slotting into place. They were all moving in unison but in their own idiosyncratic way. This was what Melvyn Bragg called in his column “an expanding sense of inner freedom”. For them and for me. These people were free because they were not looking at each other. They couldn’t even look at themselves in the big mirrors the dance studio had. I had eliminated any source of inhibition and self-doubt that could have jeopardised my class and in its place brought in a primary sense of being. Being through a rhythm they had never heard. Being a human being in communion with the beautiful art of Afro-Cuban dance.

What happened that night was magical. Recalling it now in the context of the New Statesman’s question on faith, I realise that he answer is, at least to me: there is no faith-shaped hole, there’s just a reclaiming of transcendence from a human perspective. We have come full circle, and this time we have the language to explain the phenomenon. But even if we can’t explain it, we can still feel it.

I am of the belief that our ancestors came across moments of pure magic, of “gears”. But lack of linguistic resources rendered these cavewomen and men almost speechless. Hence the tendency to export their (potential) analytical powers to forces that dwelled outside them. That way they didn’t have to worry about the answers. Sometimes, however, one doesn’t need to have any answers. Sometimes there are no answers. Sometimes there cannot be any answers, for the methods to get to this truth have not been invented yet, or we haven’t discovered them.

My answer to Melvyn’s question on the “known unknown of the universe and the brain” is, yes, it will surprise us. But it won’t mean the end of our inner liberty. If anything, we will acquire an extra dimension. An extra human dimension. Cheerio, see you in the second week of September. I hope you enjoy the music today. Music with which to unlock your non-self and inner freedom.



© 2014

Photo taken by the blog author

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 14^th September at 10am (GMT)

Killer Opening Songs (Thing of Gold by Snarky Puppy)

Is it funk, is it fusion, is it electronica, is it avant-garde, is it Latin, is it mellow, is it trad, is it experimental? What is it?

 

It’s jazz.

 

Moreover, it’s Snarky Puppy’s jazz and it is “the shape of jazz to come”, to quote Ornette Coleman.

 

Sometimes Killer Opening Songs makes his musical discoveries on his doorstep, as in when he picks up long-awaited CDs shoved through his letterbox, ordered from evil, tax-avoiding Amazon. But occasionally, K.O.S. travels far to dig out new melodies. Far as in going all the way to Glynde Place, near Brighton, in southeastern England, to the Jazz FM-sponsored Love Supreme festival.

 

Forget the hellish journey back home (more than three and a half hours on the road late at night, including a diversion that added an extra hour to the already long drive), the memories of Snarky Puppy’s performance more than made up for any inconvenience suffered. This US band that sprang into the jazz scene in 2004, has been making a lot of noise in the right way ever since, and they have the rich, eclectic and mind-blowing musical output to back up the buzz they have generated.

 

The driving force behind Snarky Puppy is bassist and composer Michael League, yet, it would be wrong to leave out the other band members. Drummer Robert “Sput” Searight, who has collaborated with the likes of Snoop Dogg and London-based Bill Laurance, who has just released a well-received debut album, Flint, are just some of the stars to be found in this combo.

 

Killer Opening Song Thing of Gold appears on Snarky Puppy’s 2012 record groundUP, a combined CD and DVD offer. The track showcases everything that makes this band the future of jazz to come. Beautiful piano and saxo join forces together at the beginning of the song to weave a spellbinding tapestry of rhythm patterns. Strings kick in shortly after and add gravitas to what is already a mesmerising piece of music. The coup de grâce is provided by Texas-born keyboardist Shaun Martin who leads the whole ensemble to a hymn-like finale.

 

Music like this is a joy to listen to. Watching the members of Snarky Puppy perform live at Love Supreme was equally a pleasure to see. And at the centre of it all lies the key: the Killer Opening Song.

 

© 2014

 

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 13^th July at 10am (GMT)