On free jazz, missing persons, and revolutionary struggle
Plus three new publications from January
Hello dears, and welcome to my second Substack newsletter!
I have three new publications to share:
“Dead Poets Love Us Back,” a review of new work by Russian-born poet Polina Barskova, is in Poetry Northwest.
My conversation on chasing heat, swinging blades, and betrayal vs atonement with poet Gabrielle Bates is in Adroit.
And an excerpt from “Daybook,” one of my poems I’m proudest of—and one of the most grueling to write—is up in the gorgeous online mag Neon Door.
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Below are seven things from the internet I loved this month: an example of how the cops work; some astounding poems; a look at Twitter’s various shitshows; an interview and duet with a free-jazz genius; a prestige-TV-level podcast on the French Revolution; and why you should never retweet missing persons announcements. Bonus: at the bottom, another Substack you should read.
Sam Levin, “Revealed: How LAPD Targeted Nipsey Hussle’s Street Corner and Store.” Sometimes the police do their work through naked violence. Other times—as at the South Central intersection of Slauson and Crenshaw, where the late entrepeneur and rapper Nipsey Hussle hoped to give back to his neighborhood by opening a slew of locally-owned businesses—they surveil, squeeze, harass, and arrest. Activists from Stop LAPD Spying have revealed how LAPD’s now-discontinued “data-driven” program Operation Laser identified the intersection as an “anchor point” of crime shortly after Hussle opened his business. In their first week of surveillance, Levin writes, “LAPD recorded 58 stops, but made only seven arrests, suggesting that for the vast majority of people stopped or detained, there was no probable cause to arrest them. [The next week,] LAPD stopped 103 people, and made only three arrests; the records say LAPD was looking for a robbery suspect described only as a Black male between 16 and 18 years old.” Even those stopped withour arrest had personal information, including social media accounts, recorded in “field interview cards” for later gang charges. (The city identified Hussle’s clothing store as a “nuisance” property for alleged gang activity, “pressuring the landlord to evict the rapper and his business partners.” Instead, the landlord sold the entire stripmall to Hussle.) Activists also revealed how law enforcement officials, totally unsurprisingly, were also in touch with LA developers about the possibility of eviction as a first step toward gentrifying the neighborhood. Hussle’s brother and business partner, Samiel Asghedom, said: “We’re here every day selling clothes, so there is less crime. This is something that y’all should be happy about. But instead, their whole goal was just to shut it down.” As Jamelle Bouie wrote in his Times column this week of how “policing itself shapes, constricts and degrades the citizenship of millions of law-abiding Americans, making a mockery of the idea that they live in a democracy or enjoy anything like political equality.” When the police target a community, the community has very little “democratic” recourse.
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Ashley Capps’s new poems in the inaugural issue of The Glacier. Sometimes a poem scalds us with unhealed and unquiet pain and anger. Sometimes a poem points toward the sacred backwards; it returns, again and again, to our repeated human failure to transcend: to the fact that we fall always away from ecstasy back to daily immanent messy preoccupied sinful life. Sometimes a poem pleases and distresses our intellect even through our pain, by reminding us of the opacity and stiff materiality of the language we attempt to cry out in. Sometimes a poet can do all of these in one sweep of work. You should read these eight poems by Ashley Capps.
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B.D. McClay, “Pleasure Needs No Politics.” In this gentle-hearted short take, McClay writes that rest, refreshment, and delight don’t need to be improbably refashioned as political. Just as dour personal asceticism has little impact on the world beyond our own self-punishing egos, so too with indulgence and pleasure: “[a]s a fan of both cream puffs and champagne (though perhaps not together) I would rather not have them reframed as Doing The Work.” We live in a culture that demands productivity, yes, but also one that encourages indulgence; we’re often tempted to believe that the things we enjoy, or depend on, need to have a demonstrable political value in order to escape some hazily-imagined judgment, external or internal—why aren’t you renouncing these luxuries to Do More? But we can instead simply say that our own comfort matters to us, without justifying its political necessity, especially when we accept (as McClay says she sometimes manages to do) that these comforts are all temporary. “[N]othing I have is really mine. They’re gifts, here for as long as they’re here, to be let go of one day… [And] this gift-like quality is also true of beauty, which is always gratuitous, always pouring itself out, which can be shared and shared without depletion. Pleasure too is a gift. These things are present in cold mornings, in the smiles of strangers, in mathematics. They do not need an argument.”
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A few readings on Twitter: Although the framing of the “Twitter Files” threads of November and December 2022—journalists sharing memos, directives, emails, Slack threads, and internal debate from Twitter’s previous leadership in a dump sanctioned (and curated) by new owner Elon Musk—was right-coded, their revelations are something leftists should care about. Some news from it, surprising or not: Twitter, despite its leadership being overwhelmingly liberal/Democrat-identified, was willing to work closely with the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the State Department and other agencies to close down or suspend accounts the government accused of retweeting “propaganda” or “disinformation”; Twitter also amplified Pentagon Arab-language psy-op accounts despite a pledge to Congress to thwart any government-backed covert-information operations. (In fact, as Twitter’s whistleblowing former head of security, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, wrote, Twitter allowed itself to be infiltrated by countless other governments as well.) Both the Trump and Biden administrations pressured Twitter to follow their shifting guidance on COVID, shadowbanning or removing certain accounts according to contractor or bot flagging, even when accounts retweeted the CDC’s own data. In none of these cases was compliance immediate—there was internal debate at Twitter and some pushback against secret government requests—but in every case, Twitter eventually played ball. Similar things are already continuing under Musk, despite Musk’s obnoxiously demonstrative flexes around a culture change under his ownership. As the often-sharp Freddie deBoer writes, “I don’t believe that a big corporation like Twitter will ever maintain anything like just or equitable rules about what can and cannot be published on its platform. I didn’t trust Twitter’s old ownership; I don’t trust the new.” So why do the Twitter Files matter?
For one thing, we’re living in an era of ongoing obvious as well as subtle perception management; if we have another summer as hot as 2020 with a Democratic president—someone who the leadership of Google, Meta, Apple etc. supports—, it feels likely that tech companies will play an active disorganizing/suppression role, and these are among the tools that will help do it.
For another, the amount of public hate Musk gets as a “bad billionaire” feels absurd—Musk is, yes, juvenile, narcissistic, and unscrupulous, but this is as opposed to, what, all the plucky noble billionaires who earned it by their hard work, and whose media ownership policies have only our best interests in mind? Musk rules more like a fickle king, and less like one of a silent and efficient coterie of oligarchs; he’s visible and hateable in a way that Vijaya Gaade never wanted to be, but most of the people maddest at Musk are mostly just part of a rival professional-managerial class cohort. Resistance to Musk should be rooted in a class analysis—billionaires are a social ill and they should not own our media—rather than, you know, personal brand.
Third, the politics of “disinformation” are laughably sketchy, and the hope offered by censorship—even of sloppy or outright false would-be scientific claims—is bogus. I plead with my leftist comrades to understand the structural reasons for widespread institutional distrust before shrugging off—or cheering for!—the arbitrary, opaque silencing powers wielded by Big Tech. (More on this in an upcoming SBT, I promise.)
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Jazz pianist and radio host Marian McPartland interviewing, and dueting with, Cecil Taylor, originally broadcast 1994. The archives of McPartland’s Piano Jazz show on NPR are a joy. McPartland came up as a pianist in Dixieland groups and 50s-era combos and she recorded one of my favorite quiet-afternoon jazz records of all time with the great Benny Carter. Though her style was a little more rangy and modern than that of her husband and occasional bandmate, cornetist Jimmy McPartland, I wouldn’t have thought she’d have much to say to a grand, wild, and radical free-jazz explorer like Cecil Taylor. But just listen to their conversation: these two adore each other.
Taylor’s piano style is full of big lurching dynamics, scurrying dinosaur-footprint runs and crashing percussive clusters of notes; there’s very little blues (no ironic vitality, no sense of balance-in-opposites), just a singular surging urge. And McPartland, 50s-combo playing style and all, drinks it up! Hearing musicians talk theory is always a joy; Taylor, tightly wound and genial at once, draws the line from his stern mom to his own anarchic style; and when they improvise together, you can hear McPartland absolutely relishing the freedom of sharing in Taylor’s invention.
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Revolutions podcast, Season 3: Since I began listening in 2019—missing my dad, with a trunk full of his old books on Marxism, I started Revolutions’s then-new tenth season on the Russian Revolution of 1917—I’ve spent hundreds of hours with Mike Duncan’s dramatic, nerdy, absorbing podcast, mostly behind the wheel. (Finn in the backseat generally tunes in for the violent parts, or to offer their syntheses: “It seems like no one in history is, like, all the way good.”) After coming to the ghastly tyrannical end of the Bolshevik project, I jumped back to the podcast’s beginning, rounding the corner this week into season five. So far, Duncan’s third season—fifty-five half-hourish episodes telling the story of the French Revolution, from Louis XVI’s decrepit ancien regime to Napoleon’s self-coronation in 1804—is my favorite. It’s utterly absorbing prestige-TV drama; the French Revolution was driven (at least until the crooked Directory takeover of summer 1794) by competing idealisms that make its debates—and its violent extremes—feel like clashes of full worldviews rather than cynical political calculation. In the French Revolution, we get Europe’s first full-time revolutionary organizer (the hulking, plug-ugly, opportunistic, lusty, zealous, politically adroit bohemian Georges Danton, still my favorite of the bunch). We get Europe’s first widespread experiments both with urban direct democracy, majoritarian ruthlessness and all (Paris’s sansculottes, the radical pre-industrial working and middle class “little people” of the city), and with vanguardist protocommunism (Gracchus Babeuf). We get the first European political document asserting the welfare of every citizen as the duty of government (France’s Constitution of 1793). We get, in Duncan’s telling, some gripping set pieces, from the Day of the Tiles and the Champ de Mars Massacre to the execution of the king and Maximilien Robespierre’s kooky Festival of the Supreme Being. We get the horrible momentum of the total-war, Saturn-devouring-his-children phase of the revolution, as yesterday’s radicals are today’s dangerous reactionaries bound for exile or the guillotine. Duncan is generally stronger on the who-what-wheres than the hows and whys; I always want a little more on ideology, social context, political economy in his accounts, though in the case of 18th century France, C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins (more on this amazing book soon), Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution, and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age have filled in some of these.
So here are three things I’ve (provisionally) learned about revolutionary struggle, from this season and from these books:
In a protracted revolutionary struggle, the center empties out. The question that drives this rush to opposing margins is: who do you fear more? France’s first revolution, of 1789, was dominated by liberal nobles and bourgeois who wanted free trade, private property rights, the rollback of inherited privileges, equal citizenship and franchise for “active citizens” (bourgeois and landed property-owners), and lawmaking by representative assembly. If this vision sounds familiar, it’s because many of 1789’s leaders, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, were veterans of America’s Revolutionary War: they wanted to replicate in France (with the addition of a constitutionally-constrained king) the planter-and-merchant-and-speculator government they’d seen born in the United States. Having achieved this with France’s Constitution of 1791, they declared their revolution over. But, within months, this arrangement was ripped apart in two different directions. The king and nobility wanted to turn the clock back to a government they ran at their own discretion, hoping to cow a populace increasingly hostile to them. Meanwhile, the emergent revolutionary middle class and sansculottes wanted to abolish the Constitution’s “active and passive” citizen distinction, declare a republican government with no king at all, and liberate (a historically novel term) France’s people from their oppression by the gentry and the rich. The liberal-noble compromise satisfied no one. Who do you fear more? The aristocrats coming to crush your civil rights, seize your property, and snatch away your vote? Or a paranoid angry urban rabble who’ll lynch you for your fancy clothes and a rural peasantry who’ll burn out your mansions to destroy their debt records? The liberal nobles feared the second just a little more than the first; their choice was made—and their fate sealed—the minute Lafayette’s national guardsmen fired into a furious crowd of republican demonstrators in July 1791. Who do you fear more? In a moment of heightened political struggle, what answer do we give to this question?
“No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as necessary.” Maximilien Robespierre, the pious, “thin-blooded,” milk-drinking lawyer and general stick-in-the-mud behind the revolutionary Jacobins, said this. In 1792, Robespierre was virtually alone in the revolutionary National Convention in opposing newly-republican France’s messianic and bellicose urge to declare war on the rest of Europe and spread the gospel of liberty to the benighted peoples of the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and beyond. Robespierre quite rightly believed that a French army, no matter its stated ideals, would never be greeted as “liberators”: that they’d make enemies of the occupied people who, whatever their political inclinations, were much more attached to their local cultures, communities, and ways of life than to anything offered by men with guns. (Especially after those men with guns de-Christianized their churches, looted their treasuries, and stole their food.) There is no such thing as liberation by force.
“The Dantons of history are always defeated by the Robespierres.” Eric Hobsbawm wrote this. Danton, Robespierre’s long-time friend and foil, was a charismatic Falstaff, “free-loving and free-spending,” who was at his prime leading the Parisian sansculottes in the turbulent just-post-revolutionary period. But the bohemians in a revolution are ultimately overpowered by the true believers. Robespierre, a cunning political tactician, was driven by a “hard narrow dedication” nursed by Roman ideals of virtue and by Rousseau’s notion of a people’s general will instantiated in an upright and visionary minority. This dedication held revolutionary France together against unthinkable odds in 1793-94. But, in the deepening paranoia of the foreign wars Robespierre had initially opposed, this same dedication also contributed to the systematic internal political violence of France’s Terror (17,000 executed, 10,000 more dead in horrid jail conditions) and the creation of a “total war” state within France, the full potential horrors of which wouldn’t emerge until the twentieth century. The voluntarist direct democracy of the bohemian sansculottes couldn’t withstand a Jacobin state mobilizing—and purging—an entire nation; they probably also couldn’t have won France’s three-front war either. When I got to the episode where, in 1794, Danton was led to the guillotine on Robespierre’s orders, I cried on southbound I-5.
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Last thing: A Twitter thread from @rahaeli on why you should never re-share missing-persons announcements on social media. This is a challenging read and I’m basically persuaded. Whose phone number is on the announcement, and does the missing person trust the broadcaster? Could a minor, if found, be returned to a situation of greater danger? Could the missing person be fleeing an abusive partner who is using the goodwill of strangers to track down and apprehend their victim? Denise (author) goes through the math on federal missing-persons reports; missing and murdered Indigenous women; sex-worker abductions; and runaway youth. Her conclusion is the same: “Unless you’re an expert in the field *and have access to information about a specific instance* beyond just what’s in a social media post, you do not, and never will, know if a post on social media is someone in need of help or someone’s abuser trying to find them… The scenarios where you sharing a thread about ‘I’m desperate to find my [relation]’ lead to that person being helped by you sharing the thread are very few. The scenarios where you sharing it lead to that person being endangered are *overwhelmingly* more likely.”
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In closing: I strongly urge you to read this Substack: poet Lucy Biederman’s The Boredom & the Horror & the Glory. Close sensitive impious pleasure-hungry reads of poets and novelists, memoir, writings on precarity and mentorship and anonymity.
The pleasure article was a great common-sense take, which I always appreciate! You've got me itching to return to Revolutions and the slog through the French one. Thanks for sharing your brilliant and intricate insights again - what a pleasure!
This is great! I'm troubled by your take that revolutions are decided by who is most feared. It seems that it would almost always be the right who is the most bloodthirsty and willing to harm, imprison, and kill. I wonder how many "successful" left revolutions were driven by that, and how many lost their way through the logic of the guillotine.