A discarded can of our College’s favorite drink. Photo by Quinn Anya. http://www.flickr.com/photos/53326337@N00/3262302956

If ever there were a case for pun making, the events of last week made it pretty convincingly. It was a Frat-zaster. The affront, the outrage, the carefully meted dialogue, mediation and reconciliation (whew, Winter Carnival, unhindered and affirmed)—there was a hint of twisted wonder in it, laying-bare of our values. If only the infamous Giaccone had been a sterner villain! A small spectacle would have become frenzied mobilization, an us-versus-them crusade of the first order.

Maybe that was the odd crux of it all, though. The fire burned out before it really got started, our forces too strong and our enemy a paper tiger. Pick any terrible array of metaphors you like, save, maybe, ones involving Phi Delt. They all fit.

Vagaries aside, last week was understandably and necessarily absurd, as though the story now needs retelling. First, Hanover Police chose an inexplicably irrational new policy towards drinking, introducing it at an inexplicably irrational time.
Second, students responded with indignant force to what seemed a strike at the heart of Dartmouth’s social world. And third, said students won, beating back discussion so quickly that it was reduced, by a Feb. 11th article in the D, to mealy-mouthed abstractions about future “transformation” and “harm reduction.”

Convincing, right? It may have been a hard battle, but hard, we can guess, in deed only. Barring some game-changing detail, the war for the frats was won well before the issue had even settled into campus consciousness. There was no “other side” to it, just a hapless police chief drowning in the horrified criticism of students, administrators, and alumni alike. Had this not happened, would Winter Carnival have been any more dangerous? The worst Pollyanna would struggle to say yes.

Whatever drove the Hanover police’s decision to craft such a strange new policy, we can guess, will yet be a fascinating story. Provided the tale isn’t ultimately monotonous, bureaucratic boilerplate (by now, we’ve heard the rumors about a threatened HPo looking to reassert itself in the face of budget cuts), there’s riveting detail yet to be uncovered here. Someone, somewhee—for some reason—must have thought that a decision to cripple the frats, one week pre-Winter Carnival, would be politically sustainable and therefore worthwhile. Whatever change in thought this marks, provided it wasn’t undertaken by a hopeless fool (which is unlikely, given Giaccone’s long tenure and President Kim’s institutional shrewdness), it will likely speak to some paradigm shift in institutional thinking that has yet to come to light.

But that’s a story for another, hopefully brighter, day. Instead, what stood out about last week’s outrage were two things, each reinforcing the other. The first: that HPo’s new policy, upon retreat, seemed to leave no meaningful imprint on campus alcohol policy, minus obligatory, conciliatory pleasantries. The second: that this change was deferred not only by the immediate strength of fraternities and sororities, but also by the unquestioned, leveling sway of their institutional logic. There is, in a crisis-unified Dartmouth imagination, no alternative to our social system as it now exists. More than anything else about this place or this school, it constitutes our identity, an identity that subjects itself neither to internal criticism nor serious debate when threatened.

This is the delicate point, it seems, that every implicit or explicit challenge to our frat system reaches, and where every attempt at genuine change falters. Assuming that the system needs to be changed (a big assumption, sure, but one deeply felt by many people), criticizing it alienates all too many students whose relationship to our campus mean very little outside of house affiliation. Sure, this monolith of Dartmouth life frustrates the unaffiliated, perhaps rightfully so, but that fact has so far proven counterproductive as a call to change on its own terms. Systemic overhaul will depend on consensus, a consensus that can’t be built when a majority as passionate as ours feels threatened. The implementation of any alternative to the fraternity system, whether that means its overhaul or its phasing into irrelevance, will depend on persuasion. Where that persuasion will come from, though, has yet to be seen.

So that’s the impasse we all reach when change, whether incremental (a la the Student Life Initiative) or severe (last week’s debacle), is hinted at. The Greek system’s acid logic persists, referring again and again to its inclusiveness, and its all-pervasiveness, as incorrigible and unquestionable defenses. Even whispers of reform threaten too many people—too many, too intimately involved. And this is what will doom our Greek system in the long term. As Matt Ritger pointed out so sagely earlier this year, our frats have long had a death sentence stamped squarely on their foreheads.

Sooner or later, they’re going to kill someone, or almost kill someone, or push the envelope just a bit too far just a few too many times. And when it happens, critics will ask, again, the questions that have been long been dismissed or cynically accommodated: Where are the alternatives? Where is the system’s progressive future? Why is the joyfully communal heart of this school, really, so inseparable from its drinking? The answers to these questions have long been just convincing enough, just evasive enough to maintain the status quo.

But where time continues to move forward, and while things on Webster Ave. remain the same, they won’t always be. Sure, Hanover Police made a stupid decision last week, but its defeat added one to what may yet be remembered, by what’s left of the Greeks, as a history of pyrrhic victories. Until then, hold on to your composites.

Timothy Geithner’s been showered with criticism in light of the economic meltdown, but does it deserve it all? Photograph by Fresh Conservative on flickr.com.

Enter Timothy Geithner, the man of the hour, just last week paraded through the House in a small populist ceremony, a rite of exfoliating outrage. Wasn’t he the perfect whipping boy? Calm, assertive, with a hint of Robert McNamara’s steely assurance—Geithner might have been every man’s wolf in sheep’s clothing as he faced a battery of accusations surrounding his involvement in AIG’s titanic bailout.

Geithner, the onetime President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, now Secretary of the Treasury, now stares down the barrel of a host of charges that would place him at the ever-tense nexus of Wall Street power and Main Street outrage.

The obvious and common argument is that Geithner is guilty by implication. As the story now seems to go, Geithner’s hands were simply too close to some sordid doings—in shortest form, the Fed’s recommendation to AIG that it not reveal information about overvalued, politically suspect “counterparty” payments to other major banks with holdings in the company—despite his having resigned from the Fed and recused himself from its future doings. Issues like these, it need not be said, do not lend themselves to nuanced reasoning. Today, finance finds its alternate definition in guilt­—an irredeemable stain on the record of any politician unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of popular rage. Where the economy continues to falter, and where Wall Street connections loom in the background, Geithner will be an object of derision and distrust.

This, you could say, is where the dialogue loses its momentum, and when the political sharks begin to circle. It’s here, too, that the narrative arc of Geithner’s story freezes between two poles that depend on one another for their dramatic tension. In one corner, there’s populist fire and brimstone; Geithner, here, is a conduit for the survival of moneyed interests within a system whose excess was its undoing rather than an agent of an outraged people—the herald, as it were, of a morally bankrupt and ever-powerful status quo’s endurance into the future. In the other corner is the image of Geithner as multi-billion-dollar bearer of necessary evil, an inside man whose position was less a measure of his corruption than it was of his ability to do the necessary thing, whether right or popular. Which side do we pick, and where do we—as citizens—choose (or not choose) to draw the battle lines?

We’re inclined to believe that the answer to this question lies in the answer to another, much simpler one. Did Geithner behave in a way that was morally and ethically suspect, or did he not? At the end of the day, there has to be some factual truth at the bottom of this inherently necessary inquiry, and we might guess that it lies somewhere in the middle—Geithner the public servant and Geithner the inside man worked in tandem, each bound by what must have seemed like, in a time of crisis, suffocating institutional logic on public and private ends of the equation. Yet that truth is well beyond the scope of this column, and we might guess that it’ll be well beyond the public imagination for some time to come as well. For it’s rarely, if ever, the nature of events like these to disclose themselves until well after the worst is over. What we instead get are stories for our time—stories whose utility lies not in factual resolution but instead in a kind of popular therapy.

Why, after all, has Geithner’s skewering unfolded without his ousting, or without some fundamental policy shifts within the Obama administration? Geithner’s ordeal has been, it would seem, a lukewarm crucifixion capable of sustaining itself indefinitely. And this is its brilliance as a narrative device—Geithner has become at once a lightening rod and sponge for angry catharsis, capable of enduring pundits’ wrath without pushing the boundaries of political acceptability too far afield. If Obama is a fundamentally pragmatic president, as has seemed (despite soaring rhetoric and enthusiasm) to be the case so far, his willingness to retain Geithner speaks to a keen understanding of tortured compromise as both policy and presentation. Without throwing his treasury secretary, and his policy, to the wolves, Obama navigated more severe calculations of public right and private wrong by placing authority in the hands of a morally gray technocrat. But where are we left when, frustrated, jobless, and frenzied with betrayal, we abstract our anger and thereby sap it of propulsive force?

Maybe that’s a question we just don’t want to ask. Maybe the intimate details of some high-profile stories, for all our good intentions and furious energy, are sometimes condemned to history’s garbage pail, indefinitely obscured, psychologically and emotionally inaccessible. And maybe these details, the essential meat, the lifeblood, of political drama, are denied to us—lost as we are in the face of a system broken beyond our understanding—by our own willing. To expose them or to treat them too frankly would be, really, to take the taut, tortured entertainment out of those narratives necessary to sustain a country in need.

t’s a strange testament, maybe, to the progress made by advocates of LGBT rights in the last decade: as the movement’s mainstream pours its energies into an ongoing fight for same-sex marriage, longtime gay rights activist Nancy Polikoff has come to find herself in the unfamiliar position of arguing against something with which she has so long identified. As part of Dartmouth’s PRIDE week, Polikoff, an American University law professor, described her stance on the relationship between law, family structure, and the creeping obsolescence of marriage.

Marriage, according to Polikoff, does not deserve its privileged status under the law. Same-sex partnerships, different-sex partnerships, and co-dependent relationships between family members are best suited to assume the legal position now held by marriage. Same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage are not the central issue here.

The problem: an archaic legal definition and system of social benefits surrounding the institution of marriage itself. It’s a position at once intuitive and strikingly forward, an instance in which history runs headlong into the necessity of change.

Polikoff’s logic draws its impetus from social conservatism and, more distantly, from an understanding of what ritualistic and regulatory function was once implicit in marriage. Historically speaking, the social upheaval of the’60s and 70s led some to view marriage as a problem rather than a solution.

On one hand, the change expanded our dialogue regarding nontraditional family structure, bringing the first tentative recognition to both same-sex couples and non-married different-sex couples. Unfortunately, it also produced a social backlash that, as Polikoff noted, quite disingenuously “appropriated the language of social science” in the defense of traditional marriage.

From this conservative reaction came the “marriage movement,” a force that has since infiltrated public debate and worked to characterize any nontraditional family formation as, to quote Polikoff, “social suicide.” Its proponents link the downfall of marriage to myriad social ills by way of questionable social science “research” (nearly all of it since invalidated), and have long constituted a buffer of pseudo legitimacy between the religious right and the political mainstream.

If figures like Polikoff seem almost viscerally disgusted by the mention of marriage, it is easy to understand why. They’ve been on the defensive, for the past several decades, against those who would poison the term by linking it to the most hostile of social agendas.

Arguably, then, “marriage” is too burdened by political and historical context to shoulder the burden placed on it by our modern legal system. Implicit in Polikoff’s rejection of the word is an argument for simply doing away with it—at least in a legal sense.

Yet this claim has so far held little sway with a frustrated LGBT rights movement, one that finds not only the legality but also (perhaps more importantly) the cultural connotation of marriage at the center of its battle for recognition. While civil unions may confer all the legal benefits of marriage, they nonetheless stand in a sort of separate-but-equal limbo relative to traditional marriage. For many in the queer community, marriage promises a deeply resonant form of social and cultural recognition.

Polikoff counters that we’ve been domesticated by the discourse surrounding marriage—manipulated, really, by a wedge issue. Both marriage and civil unions, she argues, have come to represent a form of imposition, one that necessarily discriminates against those who would otherwise choose not to pursue them but must do so out of legal necessity.

The reality of hospital visitation, legal privacy, the payment of work-related and survivor’s benefits, determinations of housing eligibility—a host of practices whose importance flows from human partnership rather than legal recognition—all revolve around a historical deadweight that gives marriage unnecessary practical weight. It’s an embarrassingly archaic legal model.

Perhaps most interestingly, Polikoff envisions the legal replacement of marriage altogether, bypassing both the gay marriage debate and its accompanying culture war, particularly in states that now have constitutional bans on any legal recognition of same-sex couples. Her approach, after all, is inclusive of homosexual relationships but it does not center the argument around them. To the extent that cultural conservatives may find the redefinition of marriage threatening, they will find poor recourse in arguments demonizing homosexuality.

It’s big news that 49 percent of Americans, according to a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll, support gay marriage. We might now predict that homosexuality, and by extension gay marriage, will follow the road traveled by miscegeny: once considered mortally taboo and so profoundly base, interracial relationships are now essentially interwoven with our conception of basic rights.

Yet whether a desperately needed redefinition of marriage will follow from the same point of origin remains to be seen. A shift in societal values, however practical, always seems to grind along oh so slowly—especially when it contends not only with internal division but also with a domestic state of affairs that is, ahem, in the toilet.

Sometimes all we can do is cross our fingers.

ometimes what we say and what we do are mutually exclusive. In many ways, this adage is appropriate for last Thursday’s performance at the Hop commemorating Blue Note Records’ 70th anniversary. In fewer words: there was something about this ostensibly celebratory show that seemed, in a way, elegiac.

The night’s cast was, by all definitions, an all-star one: pianist Bill Charlap, joined by saxophonists Steve Wilson and Ravi Coltrane (yes, John Coltrane’s son), trumpeter Nicholas Payton and guitarist Peter Bernstein, alongside drummer Lewis Nash and bassist Peter Washington. To discuss the discography of each musician would be to recount a fair slice of jazz’s history over the past two decades; to describe this performance as anything but masterful would be disingenuous.

Per the occasion, the group played a selection of compositions originally written by some of Blue Note Records’ most historically prominent musicians: Thelonius Monk, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Dorham, and Freddie Hubbard, among others. Almost all were active during the’60s and 70s, Blue Note’s heyday and the time during which its signature (and best-selling) hard bop sound was developed. Characteristic of this music was the insistence and complexity of bebop, paired with a harder-driving, more model, and oftentimes more overtly blues-oriented sound. Save for romps through two Monk tunes, the group deviated little from this aesthetic, and, if anything, erred on the side of faithfulness to history.

Blue Note Records is, simply put, really, really famous in the jazz world. Over the last 70 years, it has issued albums not only by well-known figures like John Coltrane and Bud Powell, but also by scores of innovative musicians who’ve fallen, and continue to fall, below the radar of mainstream taste. Paternalism — really, though, “maternalism” may be the better word — seems to flow through the label’s veins. Not only have figures in the company, like label co-founder Alfred Lion and the legendary sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder, had a strikingly prescient ear for talent, but they’ve also exuded a sweetness that makes Blue Note history the stuff of legends. Lion, it’s said, used to drive musicians to and from his New Jersey studio, and, according to the label’s CEO, buy “food and liquor” for them in times of need.

All of this wouldn’t mean much to the performance, obviously, had it not been preceded by a forum on jazz and class (part of an ongoing Hop discussion series devoted to the latter). After all, jazz is a music that arose from the margins of society, a Horatio Alger story in its purest form. For the African-American musicians who constructed their music by virtue of raw creativity, achievement was a form of empowerment and defiance. As critic Howard Mandel pointed out at the event, jazz has long offered a kind of meritocratic haven not only to blacks in a pre-Civil Rights America, but to all who sought to dip their toes in the medium.

Times have changed, though, and so has the source from which jazz once culled so much of its vitality. Blue Note may still draw music, and musicians, from the margins of artistic culture, but no longer does it draw them from the margins of society. That’s what lent Thursday night’s performance such a strange quality, something pristine and almost museum-like that spoke to the music’s increasing distance from tradition.

As one of the ensemble’s saxophonists, Steve Wilson, pointed out in a discussion with Mandel, the music’s culture is something separate from what it once was. Jazz has moved from neighborhood to university, and ninety-five percent of the students now studying it are white and, presumably, middle to upper-middle class. It bears a striking resemblance to the study of classical music.

Sure, this isn’t an altogether bad thing. It’s in large part responsible for the level of artistry, virtuosity, and complexity that’s now standard to the genre. Nor is it fair to ignore the accessibility and the democratization that comes with systematized education. Yet the nostalgia on display at Thursday’s concert underscored a striking tension in the music’s history.

Sure, the performance was wonderful in so many ways: the playing stellar, the songs engaging, the crowd engaged. But the night’s flaws were instead flaws of omission, flaws of suggestion. The music was historically static. If the concert really was a Blue Note retrospective, where was a nod to less widely known but similarly titanic label-sponsored artists like Andrew Hill and Ornette Coleman? Where was a composition by one of the group’s own members, or by a young, progressive musician like Greg Osby or Aaron Parks? Where was a model of group interplay that focused less on themes and solos and more on compositional depth? Where was a more progressive understanding of tradition and history?

If only out of respect, it’s worth repeating that the concert was great: inscrutable, really, on a number of levels. But it was not forward-looking, and it was not vital in the way jazz must be if it’s to remain relevant – and therefore capable of engaging people who are not old, white, and educated. The music is in historical limbo. It faces death by abstraction, something modern classical music has long struggled with. And it’s threatened by such ritual adherence to, and idealization of, tradition.

]]> http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/04/10/a-little-blue-on-blue-note/feed/ 0 http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/03/13/a-disappointing-turnout/ http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/03/13/a-disappointing-turnout/#comments Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Theodore J. Wojcik http://www.dartmouth.edu/~thepress/?p=1755

riday, March 4th, a small, subdued crowd showed up to listen to a talk by Amiri Baraka—yes him, the famous playwright, poet and activist. Throughout the event, one couldn’t help but wonder: where was the excitement, the overflow seating, the raw sense of eagerness to accompany the man’s appearance? Jane Goodall may have been a humanitarian and a lover of apes, but Baraka is something else: a witness to, a flag bearer of, an equally controversial, eccentric, and brilliant participant in the Civil Rights Movement. The playwright’s (literally) subterranean speech, given deep in Rocky 3, was the sort of living metaphor that strikes a person square in the face.

While Baraka confirmed his visit to Dartmouth at the last minute, making the poster campaigns and institutional advertising you’d expect for such a major speaker impossible, the absence of even a mass campus blitz the night before was strange. Whether due to some desire to contain publicity or concerns that the event, which had to be scheduled in the moderate-sized auditorium Rocky 3 at the last minute, would be too crowded, the end result was empty seats and a missed opportunity for most of the Dartmouth population.

Baraka’s story, told through a mix of anecdotes, autobiography, and commentary and framed by tales of the civil rights movement, lay at the center of his speech. From Newark, New Jersey, to New York City, then to Cuba and San Francisco, then back to Newark, Baraka’s adult life has dutifully (and, as many would argue, necessarily) traced the extremes of African-American politics.

Living as a college student cum military officer cum starving artist in New York City, the playwright underwent a in’60 political transformation while visiting Cuba, then in the throes of revolution. Inspired to pursue activist work, Baraka was an early proponent of Malcolm X and his assertive rejection of nonviolent protest, an acquaintance of Martin Luther King Jr., and an instrumental player in the development of black nationalism. He has spearheaded the formation of numerous artistic groups, and has long stood tall at the fringe of cultural criticism—a fiery commentator on race and politics who, throughout his iconoclastic quest to define black identity, has been alternately described by some as racist, homophobic, sexist, and anti-Semitic.

In some ways, Friday’s Baraka seemed the man he’s always been cast as, the one we imagine behind a mask of seething characters and pointed commentary: controversial, indignant, self-assured and, eager. En route to Dartmouth, he had lost both his bag and a tooth (in a fall), but nevertheless took to the podium with poise. Describing his history and relationship with the Civil Rights Movement, Baraka struck no conciliatory notes and initiated no dialogue with the past. Instead, he strode forward without apology; the events he described appeared not through the chastened lens of time, but as they must have to Baraka at age thirty, age forty, and age fifty. Stubborn though it may have been, his delivery conveyed something of a rarely seen commitment and vigor that we rarely see, a fierceness of vision whose sincerity is its saving grace.

If celebrity is a measure not only of brilliance but also of boldness, Baraka possesses the latter in excess. His persona was a formidable force, convincing in its self-assuredness. Not that Baraka was particularly controversial—he wasn’t. Instead, the man who once called for white genocide was restrained and affable, a stern but ultimately moderate commentator on issues of race and politics. Perhaps Baraka’s most pointed exhortation, one of the evening’s few, came while he fielded questions. When an African-American girl wondered what it meant for her, and those like her, to settle (post-college) outside of the less privileged communities in which they were raised, Baraka came down firmly: such behavior is not okay. Instead, he argued, it is the responsibility of underprivileged, highly educated African Americans to return to and better their communities. In such a moment, Baraka’s forceful, abrasive manner was apparent: one part moral assurance, one part utter presumptuousness.

Is activism and political awareness so diminished now that we no longer rally around figures like Amiri Baraka, whether to support or oppose them? Here was a man whose vigor has defined him through years of intertwined political, social, and cultural warfare, quietly appearing on our campus. Where was the heckler from The Dartmouth Review? Where was the group of radicals to follow Baraka in lock step? When the eagerness of an old man runs headlong into the unruffled tranquility of a younger audience, generational divide is palpable. In the presence of this world’s Barakas we feel the strange heaviness of our generation’s peaceful upbringing, the wonderful and terrifying insularity that comes when there is no Great Depression, no Civil Rights Movement, no Cold War to cleave our political identities into being.

We expect to feel the radicalism, the raw intensity of political figures like Baraka viscerally, as something transformative and enthralling, as majestically big. But deep inside Rocky, that feeling was lost. Praise to our College, really, for bringing Amiri Baraka here. It was fantastic. But next time, whip up some fervor to go along with it—even if it’s contrived, as desperate a plea to someone’s corny understanding of tradition, as the chill we’re supposed to feel when told of the “granite in our muscles and in our veins.” If tradition can be marketed, Frankenstein-like, into being, perhaps we can revive political fervor by the same means. It would be a start, at least.

]]> http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/03/13/a-disappointing-turnout/feed/ 0 http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/02/27/the-quottalentedquot-us-border-patrol/ http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/02/27/the-quottalentedquot-us-border-patrol/#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Theodore J. Wojcik http://www.dartmouth.edu/~thepress/?p=1746

e’re all familiar with the long, storied, and infinitely bizarre history of propaganda, but this may come as a surprise to even the most jaded: over the past year, the U.S. Border Patrol has commissioned and distributed music as part of a campaign to prevent illegal immigration. Come again?

The resulting songs, known as “migra corridos” in Spanish (literally “migration songs,” although the phrase is more a play on a derogatory term, “la migra,” used by immigrants to describe the border patrol), come at a time when illegal immigration is an obviously hot issue. Though its rate has slowed from a high of 800,000 a year in 2000-2004 to approximately 500,000 in 2005-2008, according to a report by the Pew Hispanic Center, the Border Patrol still records large numbers of disruptions on the U.S.-Mexico border. Between 2005 and 2008, for instance, the Agency reported 723,825 arrests, 390 deaths, and 1,264 rescues.

Evidently, the Border Patrol felt this was cause enough to take up song-writing, and in 2008 outsourced the production of a CD, the eponymous Migra Corridos, to Washington-based Hispanic ad agency Elevacion. In turn, Elevacion distributed tracks from the album to popular commercial radio stations in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. Though the songs were originally supposed to be played only as short clips, in conjunction with commercials from the Mexican government discouraging illegal immigration, they generated so much interest among listeners that stations began giving them regular play (you can listen to some of the tracks, courtesy of the BBC, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7879206.stm).

A key part of Border Patrol’s strategy, logic would have it, was keeping its affiliation with these “migra corridos” concealed; the more listeners identified its music as propaganda, the agency felt, the less responsive they would be to its message. Accordingly, “migra corridos” were aimed at the public from two directions. First, they followed in the broader tradition of the “corrido” song form, a longstanding kind of narrative Mexican ballad set to simple melodies. Second, they crafted gruesome, intensely personal narratives of death, disappointment, and despair. To a strangely upbeat series of accordion-driven background tracks, men and women croon, alternately, about such uplifting things as: being left for dead, thirsty, in the desert, and ultimately dying; being raped, bearing witness to the murder of one’s child at the hands of a human smuggler, then dying; being trapped in the back of an airtight tractor trailer, after having been abandoned by a smuggler, and dying. To borrow from an Associated Press translation of several verses in the latter song:

“To cross the border/He put me in a trailer box/There I shared my suffering/With another 40 immigrants/I was never told/This was a trip to hell.”

And another, courtesy of the Latin American Harold Tribune:

“Night fell, silence came and 1,000 stars suffered with me/ when suddenly, far away, life put me before a friend/ He was sick, he was shivering and his eyes were full of fear/ He begged me, ‘Take me…don’t leave me to die like a dog.”

It would be cruelly disingenuous to mock the heavy-handedness of these songs, which seems to border on self-parody, were they the product of real (read: actually happened) human suffering—that is, if they were borne of a genuine want to deal with real tragedy through real music. But they’re not. Cooked up by an ad agency in Washington, the migra corridos are a mish-mash of low-quality instrumentals and corny vocals. While it is hard to believe that the songs are not based on true accounts of border crossings gone sadly awry, their existence as propaganda rather than as art is a strange one. Can we therefore deem their appeal as exploitative? Or does their hazily defined service of the public good place these songs in a moral gray zone?

This is the finer side of the issue. After all, since 2005, deaths on the border have fallen from a high of 492 to 390 in 2008, a trend likely explained not only by demographic shifts but also by a flood of new strategies employed by the Border Patrol. In light of all the other miserably misguided, ham-fisted policies we can now trace to the Bush Administration—rampant abuse of the public trust, torture, misgovernment, fence-building, domestic propaganda (!)—Christ, who’s to complain about a bit of spirited dis-information abroad, especially if it’s saving lives? If nothing else, after all, the past eight years have trained us to speak the language of moral compromise with striking articulateness.

Thankfully, these aren’t questions we should have to ask anymore in a post-Bush era. Ethical ambiguity will always stand front and center in the making of policy, sure, but propaganda is not ambiguous. Public service announcements, press releases, advertising campaigns: these forms, among others, of transparent self-advocacy will always be available to government. But Migra Corridos, a greatest hits album of faux-social awareness courtesy of Uncle Sam? Please. We should expect a bit more dignity from those in power, especially if our country hopes to receive it in return.

]]> http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/02/27/the-quottalentedquot-us-border-patrol/feed/ 0 http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/02/13/a-twisted-trio/ http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/02/13/a-twisted-trio/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Theodore J. Wojcik http://www.dartmouth.edu/~thepress/?p=1726

here’s something flat out wonderful about it, really—that our school, an outpost in rural New Hampshire, has managed to do what it’s done in the past year and a half. Since the fall of 2007, we’ve seen performances by Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, and Chick Corea—three of the most influential jazz pianists of our time. Who would have thought? And now, we can add to that list (perhaps most remarkably) Vijay Iyer. I can’t help but think that the person who oversees the Hop’s programming is going straight to heaven.

Iyer appeared with his trio on January 29th, alongside a group led by drummer Dafnis Prieto. The scheduling was a striking divergence from recent jazz programming, which has seemed to balance bawdy showboating (did anyone else retch through Arturo Sandoval’s performance, or for that matter, Omar Sosa’s?) with more conventional forms. What was unique about Iyer’s performance, though, was its notable divergence from the mainstream. ClichÉd though the line is, it’s worth invoking: the music created by the pianist, joined by Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, was not for the faint of heart.

Iyer, who at late thirty-something is still relatively young, occupies what some critics describe as the periphery and others as the heart of modern jazz. His angular harmonic sense is a hybrid of the styles of prominent but iconoclastic players like Thelonious Monk, Andrew Hill, and Cecil Taylor, and his rhythmic sense… well, that is distinctly Iyer’s, whatever its stylistic or cultural origins. It’s a unique feature of the pianist’s music that it twists, turns, and is often alien to the western ear’s ability to identify common rhythm. Many of his pieces are in odd time signatures like 7/4, or 13/8, and make use of juxtaposed patterns that Iyer described as “the rhythmic equivalent of voice leading.”

As such, reviewing a performance such as Iyer’s requires that one navigate a fine line between pretension and vulgarity. The avant-garde, a category into which much of the pianist’s recorded output arguably falls (relative, at least, to his contemporaries), is perpetually poorly-mapped and therefore polarizing territory—one inclined to draw sermonizing of the best and worst kinds. That Iyer’s trio began its performance with its most challenging piece, a frenetic whirl of piano, bass, and drums with no obvious rhythmic or melodic hook, didn’t help in establishing a rapport with the Hop’s audience. Neither did a set comprised mostly of originals that were similarly challenging.

Yet there was an incredible magnetism to Iyer’s playing that made it great, despite a veneer of inaccessibility. The pianist was at his best when manipulating rhythm, distorting and reshaping it across a roiling sonic landscape, opening dissonant voids in the music that would resolve in fantastic syncopated collisions. Taken against his recent recorded output as a leader, Iyer’s playing and, in particular, improvising, seemed more thematically and structurally coherent. At times his right hand lines skittered across the piano as through they were transcriptions of a Jason Moran solo, while at other timess the trio slipped similarly into the lilting, ambiguous lyricism of Robert Glasper’s playing. There were even moments during the performance when Iyer, Crump, and Gilmore assumed the insouciant, if not bombastic, in-the-pocket stride of a personality heavy trio like the Bad Plus. Such flexibility spoke to the depth of mastery achieved not only by the trio’s individual musicians, but also to the strength of their chemistry.

It took the night’s double bill, however, to drive this point home. After all, Iyer and his trio were essentially an opening act for Cuban-born drummer Dafnis Prieto’s sextet, which proceeded to play a lively set. But for all its obvious technical mastery and engagingness, Prieto’s playing offered a stark example of the sort of convention, characterized largely by rigidly defined solos, minimal group interplay, and static compositions, that Iyer had just so clearly defied and reconstructed. It was enough to leave this observer fast asleep in the first row of Spaulding Auditorium—not for lack of interest in or appreciation for Prieto, but simply having been exhilarated by what had come before.

]]> http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/02/13/a-twisted-trio/feed/ 0 http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/01/30/minimal-disappointment/ http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/01/30/minimal-disappointment/#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Theodore J. Wojcik http://www.dartmouth.edu/~thepress/?p=1711

n artist’s public presence is often disappointing. To the extent that we expect him to make apparent some breadth of understanding or mastery of craft, frustration often ensues. Is he shy? Can he appreciate his own creativity? Does he lack the analytical tools to describe it in full? However we answer these questions, Phillip Glass’ January 15th appearance at the Hopkins Center was no exception to the rule and was a diminutive compliment to the minimalist composer’s formidable stature in the world of modern music.

In fewer words, Glass’ night on stage was underwhelming, an appearance perhaps anticipated by the low-key aesthetic of its subject’s work. He emerged for a Q&A following the presentation of two short films he scored, “Evidence” (1995) and “Anima Mundi” (1992), during which questions revolved mostly around his collaborations with the film’s director, Godfrey Reggio (the two have worked together for decades). Glass’ responses ranged from modest to ramblingly anecdotal.

On working together: “collaborating means trusting the person youíre working with.” On the relationship of film to its score: “Images are surprisingly neutral emotionally—the emotional inflection comes from music.” On his aural tastes: the composerís own work, recorded by various performers, and music from other parts of the world, “distant enough for me so that I don’t have to listen to what they’re doing.” On the sometimes-commercial nature of his work: “In the country we live in, how do you expect an artist to live?” On the widespread emulation of his approach to composition: a “wonderful thing.”

If minimalism is, in the words of Brian Eno (himself the father of ambient music), “a drift away from narrative and towards landscape,” then the two films shown prior to Glass’ appearance fell squarely in that category. “Evidence,” at approximately seven minutes long, offered little more than stilted, panning shots of young children’s faces—all of them vacant, if not faintly sad, who at the piece’s end are revealed to be watching television. Set against a pulsating, insistently gloomy vamp, over which a soprano saxophone lays spare lines, the piece is an elusive tone poem, an impression, rather than a story or explicit statement about our relationship with technology.

A similar feel pervaded “Anima Mundi.” The film, a twenty-some minute montage of footage from the natural world whose creation was sponsored by the World Wildlife Foundation, unfolds to music by turns hopeful and sad, and is propelled forward by the same reliance on percussive ostinato used in “Evidence.” If there is clearly defined meaning or narrative intent in either work, it is well concealed; instead, what matters far more in both films is atmosphere, and the subjective relationship of a viewer to it.

To his credit, Glass deserves no criticism for a stage persona that was, in this observer’s eyes, kind, engaging, and modest, and he did succeed in offering the audience a lively discussion of his work with scoring. The explicit purpose of Glass’ visit, after all, was to discuss his breadth of work as it pertains to film, something he touched on in describing unique relationships with the likes of Reggio and documentarist Errol Morris. But the composer’s restraint, if not an undisciplined interview, left an elusive void at the center of the evening given the dearth of questions posed not only by the films shown and their austere beauty, but also by the legacy of a man who stands alongside Steve Reich and John Adams as a generation-defining icon of American music. One of the nightís better moments came when Glass mused on the desirability of releasing oneís work anonymously; “I’d prefer that,” he said, “What an extraordinary relationship you would have with the work!” But the opportunity to prod him further was lost as the conversation bore on, and with it the chance to further get to know one of the countryís great musical minds.

]]> http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2009/01/30/minimal-disappointment/feed/ 0