Go Ahead, Listen to Some Old School Hippie Hip Hop (in the rain?)

Hanif Abdurraqib's rambling and perceptive "love letter to a group, a sound, and an era" inspired me to listen to a number of old school hip-hop albums-- most of which I am familiar-- but a few of which I never heard; his book, which Zman recommended to me and I recommend to you, is called Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest and it astutely points out the difference between the gangsta rap of NWA and the mellower musings of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and the other Native Tongues rappers is that the members of NWA were “absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young white people most excited and old white people most afraid”, while the Native Tongues rappers were “absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young black people most curious and old black people most welcoming”;

Abdurraqib explains that the jazz samples of The Low End Theory was the first hip-hop that he could really play around his parents without fear of criticism; I also learned that the hip hop magazine The Source only gave their coveted five mic rating to a select group of albums:

• People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm – A Tribe Called Quest
• Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em – Eric B. & Rakim
• AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted – Ice Cube
• One for All – Brand Nubian
• De La Soul Is Dead – De La Soul
• The Low End Theory – A Tribe Called Quest
• Illmatic – Nas
• Life After Death – The Notorious B.I.G.
• Aquemini – Outkast
• The Blueprint – Jay-Z
• Stillmatic – Nas
• The Fix – Scarface
• The Naked Truth – Lil' Kim
• Trill OG – Bun B
• My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – Kanye West

and while I've listened to most of these, I missed "One for All" from The Brand Nubians-- it's a clever, allusion laden rhymefest-- and I never listened to "De La Soul is Dead" much either because it's not on any streaming service-- but my son pirated that album and 3 Feet High and Rising and he somehow got them both onto my Spotify as local files, so now I can stream them . . . I also noticed that The Chronic is also available now on Spotify, so they must have cleared the samples for that one.

Dad is Extra

I might have been a wee bit melodramatic yesterday when I arrived home from my tennis match with a pulled quadricep muscle; I called the boys downstairs to break the news to them and once I had assembled them in the living room and I told them the news-- the fact that their father was injured-- indefinitely injured, perhaps even crippled-- and that they would have to pick up the slack around the house: help their mother, walk the dog, take out the garbage, play tennis with each other, get jobs, help pay the mortgage, look after the bamboo and the sapling I planted, etcetera-- once I had told them this tragic news (and the fact that I was very sad because I had disappointed the family-- I wouldn't be able to take Alex snowboarding next week, I wouldn't be able to hit tennis balls with Ian, and I had abandoned the tennis match, leaving my poor opponent without anyone to play after a measly twenty-minutes of tennis) the kids took a look at my pathetic figure on the couch and laughed at me; Alex said, "Jesus Dad, the way you called us down, I thought someone we know died from covid . . . you'll be fine, just rest it" and he was right-- I took some Advil and a nap and today it feels a bit better-- I'm still going to take two week off from tennis and I ordered a roller and a thigh wrap-- and then after some consultation with the sports medicine people at the dog park-- I purchased a "muscle gun" . . . these things are supposed to work wonders and now I know that I need to REALLY warm-up before competitive tennis-- not just some light stretching, but some vigorous stationary-biking and some short sprints . . . so I'm in a better mood today and I'm going to use this injury as a portent for changing things for the better in my life, I'm done wallowing in misery for now).

Tennis Notes . . . I Am an Idiot

I was really looking forward to my tennis match this morning with Bill-- who is a consistent grinder a few years older than me-- because while I thought I would be able to win handily, I would get a lot of practice hitting slice backhands and cross-court winners, which are shots I need to work on . . . and when I took the lead 3-0 on him he started to mix things up and he hit a beautiful drop shot and my brain said It just might be possible to get to that and then I was sprinting and while I did get to the shot, I pulled my left quad on the way there-- something went "ping" in there-- and while I tried to continue the match-- I didn't want to put Bill out-- it was starting to hurt more and more and I couldn't push off so I abandoned ship and drove home and now I'm in pain and laid up and miserable-- tennis was my favorite part of the week!-- and while I can't complain, because I'm alive during a pandemic, I have learned that I need to REALLY warm up before I play-- I did some light stretching but that's not enough, I need to ride the bike and take a jog and make sure I'm ready to roll before I start sprinting around like a madman for no good reason.

Could This Book Explain That Book?

Now that I have begun Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family, I am wondering if the mysteries and enigmas of the last book I read-- Piranesi-- could be explained by schizophrenia (an affliction that 1 in 100 people will suffer from at some point during their life).

Piranesi

Susanna Clark's elegant new novel Piranesi is a major departure from her last book; Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which she published in 2004, is a massively footnoted faux-historical tome on magic during the Napoleonic Wars-- it's fantastic-- but I think her new work is something special as well; it reminds me a bit of Nabokov's Pale Fire . . . or a more abstract Eternal Sunshine . . . or Inside Out for adults . . . or none of that, it's unusual and surreal, but precisely written-- I'm not sure if I fully understand the mystery-- or if that's even possible, but I will say this, without spoiling: it's the perfect book to read in quarantine.

Sam Harris Adds Clarity . . . Lawrence Wright Adds the Anecdotes

The new Sam Harris podcast An Insurrection of Lies provides some clarity of thought about the storming of the capitol; Harris is worried about two misconceptions, one on the right and one on the left . . .

he is worried that the right is falsely equating the storming of the capitol with the riots, looting, and burning that occurred during the BLM protests-- and while Harris believes that the media did an abysmal job reporting on the chaos that occurred during those protests, that the media bent over backwards to not appear racist, and that Biden and Harris could have criticized the criminal behavior more overtly-- he still thinks you can't equate the natural eruption of mob criminality that happened in certain instances with a sloppy and disgraceful coup spurred on by a sitting President who knows he has a cult-like following of misinformed and delusional zealots and backed by a number of Republicans who fully well know that the election was not stolen but kowtow to Trump for strategic reasons . . . especially since this is an embarrassment on the world stage and perfect proof for regimes in Russia and China that democracy is bullshit;

he is worried that the left is equating the police action during the siege as more proof of white supremacy and systemic racism . . . that if this was a BLM protest, folks would have been treated differently; he brings up the point of the black cops being pursued by the white mob . . . these black cops weren't complicit in the siege, they were in an untenable situation-- fearing for their lives-- and a white woman was shot in the neck and executed by police . . . if this happened at a BLM protest, it would have been cause for further rioting; there may be a sinister conspiracy as to why the police presence was so small (or it might be the fault of the DC mayor, who didn't like the heavy-handed tactics of the National Guard at the BLM protests) but Harris is worried that the left will racialize this event instead of using as a starting point for laws instead of norms for the president-- he's hoping Biden enacts some laws to make the Presidency "psychopath proof" but of course the best way to avoid this is to NOT elect a psychopath;

his main thrust is that if you wholeheartedly believe everything you hear from either the right OR the left, your thoughts will achieve a cult-like conformity . . .

for another podcast that gets into this listen to the Joe Rogan featuring Lawrence Wright-- I enjoyed all three hours of the dialogue; Lawrence Wright knows his stuff on this topic-- he interviewed the son of Jim Jones (that's quite a story) and he wrote "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief" and "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."

Excursions of Dave

I'm reading Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib so today I'll let Q-tip do the talking:

Beats that are hard, beats that are funky
It could get you hooked like a crackhead junkie.

Tennis Notes

I took it easy this week-- alcohol-wise and exercise-wise-- because I thought I was playing an excellent in the Saturday morning tennis league . . . last week I had an easy match where I got to practice various serves and shots (as I destroyed my opponent . . . he had no killer instinct) which was kind of a nice break because the scouting report I received on Manoj was that he tough to beat, especially if his first serve was on-- but I arrived at the club this morning and found out that Manoj pulled his groin and hurt his elbow-- so he is out for the rest of the season-- and I was playing his replacement, a guy with a Russian accent named Alex . . . this was a bit of a letdown as I was amped up to see how I would fare against Manoj-- but when I started warming up with Alex, I realized I was going to have my work cut out for me anyway-- Alex was hitting the ball hard in warm-ups-- a strong forehand and a big first serve and he wanted to take a bunch of overhead smashes, which he killed . . . then we started playing-- and while his first serve was intimidating (he even aced me once) I noticed he didn't have a great backhand, it was a spinning slice shot which skipped low, nor did he have a great second serve and he sometimes made unforced errors-- and so instead of attacking the net and trying to hit winners-- which wasn't working all that well (after some long games full of errant shots, we were tied 4 to 4) I started concentrated on something simple-- keeping my eye on the ball-- and I hit my serves to his backhand, kept the ball in play, and watched him run around his backhand and feed me hittable balls . . . with this simple strategy, I won the next seven games straight and beat him 11-4.

Dave Reads His Second AI Novel in as Many Months

I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of sci-fi writer Becky Chambers . . . I loved her novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet-- her future world is a topical and wry combination of Star Trek and The Hitchhiker's Guide, from a feminine perspective-- and her second book in the Wayfarers series, A Closed and Common Orbit, is something special; it's more of a spin-off than a sequel, told from several interesting points-of-view in two distinct time frames . . . and while I recently read a funny and poignant book written from the perspective of an AI, which I thoroughly enjoyed, this one is more detailed, developed, and profound about the nature of consciousness-- artificial, enhanced, cloned, and alien . . . and it's also quite clever about how these various cultures might exist together:

"Why don't different species sit together?" she asked . . . 

segregated transit cars didn't mesh with what she'd read of Port Coriol's famed egalitarianism . . .

"Different species," Blue said, "different butts."

My Son Might Be Smarter Than Me?

During this pandemic, I've seen my kids do number of things that don't seem smart at all-- for example, my sixteen year old son Alex likes to cut an avocado in half while holding it in his hand, with a giant knife, while walking around the kitchen-- and it's exhausting to be constantly suggesting things that seems commonsensical, like "why don't you put that thing on a solid, less fleshy surface, and use a cutting board?"-- so when Alex wanted to watch Primer last week, I assumed it would be a disaster-- Primer is the most realistic (and the most difficult to understand) time-travel movie ever made-- Chuck Klosterman has a great essay about the film in which he lauds it to no end but he also reminds folks that:

"Primer is hopelessly confusing and grows more and more byzantine as it unravels (I’ve watched it seven or eight times and I still don’t totally know how it works)"

so I advised my son to turn on the subtitles, but he refused-- he wanted to "do it the hard way"-- and I told him that it took me a couple viewings to get it, and some charts, and a whiteboard . . . and then we watched the movie and he understood the first time through . . . and not only that, he predicted the existence of the failsafe machine-- a plot device I did not understand until I had watched the film a half dozen times . . . he said that taking A.P. Physics helped him understand the incomprehensible jargon at the start of the movie and the rest . . . well, though this is the same kid that picked up a rotisserie chicken with cloth oven mitts (because he thought you used oven mitts to pick up things that are hot . . . I had to explain that if the item is hot, moist and greasy-- then you DON'T use oven mitts) but despite the e lapses in common sense, I think it's time for me to admit that his brain might function a lot better than mine (he is taking four AP classes this year and aims to be an aerospace engineer . . . maybe someday I'll convince him to read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow).

To Infinity and Beyond . . .

While we were watching football, my son Ian asked me if you had to kick a field goal through the goal posts and I told him that you did not-- you could kick the ball as high as you like, because the goal posts extend upward to infinity . . . this is also true for the goal-tending cylinder in basketball: I can't think of any other infinite sporting boundaries of significance, but perhaps there are others . . . and I think I might extend this sentence to infinity . . . why not . . . ellipses are cheap . . .

Rule Number One for the Ladies: Don't Compliment Dave

Normally, folder review for the Rutgers Expos Class is at least a little bit stressful; a team of us teach the course-- which is notoriously difficult-- at my high school and if the kids pass, then they can buy the credits and avoid taking the class freshman year . . . folder review is when Rutgers makes sure that we are grading up to their rigorous standards, and while it's always done in an open and academic fashion, any time someone grades your grading, things can get contentious-- my reputation used to be that I was a bit fast and loose with my grades . . . and I often found myself debating on behalf of a student and their paper in order to maintain a higher grade-- but this year we have a new liaison and I met with her today and she obviously didn't get the memo: normally, intelligent women only admonish and counsel Dave . . . they don't shower him with compliments-- because his self-esteem is already bloated and swollen (for no good reason other than using mental health strategies similar to the one the fox used to assure himself that those grapes were sour) so I was quite surprised when the new lady said my grades were "precisely what she would have given" and she said we see "exactly eye-to-eye" and she loved the specificity of my comments and my modeling of close reading and she couldn't wait for my input at the grading calibration workshop . . . this was very fun for a few minutes-- and it was especially entertaining to rub it in Brady's face, as he used to be the grading king-- but now I'm feeling a lot of pressure-- I'm more used to being the amiable screw-up that could use some constructive direction; we'll see how this new role goes.

A Solemn Promise

If I survive this pandemic-- either through avoidance, vaccination, or catching covid and developing antibodies, then I am never washing my hands again (even after using a gas station restroom where you need to get a key connected to a wooden block by a chain).

Air Fryer = This Moment from The Simpsons

After extensive research, many unsolicited testimonials, and some serious discussion, we finally broke down and purchased an air-fryer (but we're never getting an Insta Pot . . . never!) and I must admit, it works . . . and it works fast-- just like the internet; the first thing that came to mind when I used the air-fryer was a moment from a mid-90s episode of The Simpsons and I found it . . . fast . . . enjoy.

2020: A Good Year For Reading Books

I read 54 books in 2020-- the most since I've been keeping this list-- and one of those books was The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, a monstrous time that should count as two books-- and while there are a number of good reads on the list, if I had to pick three favorites, they would be:

Best Literary Fiction:  Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Best Non-fiction: Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

Best Sci-fi: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

and the best detective series would be the first three Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley

here's the complete list, happy reading . . .

1) The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston

2) The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch

3) Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré

4) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

5) This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

6) Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

7) Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino

8) A Red Death by Walter Mosley

9) White Butterfly by Walter Mosley

10) Death Without Company by Craig Johnson

11) Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Rafferty

12) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

13) Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh

14) The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding

15) The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

16) A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

17) The Secret History by Donna Tartt

18) Phil Gordon's Little Green Book by Phil Gordon 

19) Elements of Poker by Tommy Angelo

20) Harrington on Hold'em Vol I by Dan Harrington

21) The Bat by Jo Nesbø

22) Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'em by Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta, Matt Flynn

23) Hold'em Poker by David Sklansky

24) Harrington on Hold'em Vol II by Dan Harrington

25) To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey

26) Waiting for Straighters by Tommy Angelo

27) American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

28) Townie by Andre Dubus III

29) Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen

30) The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

31) Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

32) Do Not Resuscitate by Nicholas Ponticello 

33) The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez

34) The Cipher by Kathe Koja

35) Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosely

36) Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

37) "H" is For Homicide by Sue Grafton

38) The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani

39) Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Tournaments by Jonathan Little

40) Soccer Systems and Strategies by Jens Bangsbo and Birger Peitersen

41) The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide edited by Michael Craig

42) Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

43) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

44) Tightrope: Americans Reaching For Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

45) The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

46) The Peripheral by William Gibson

47) Set My Heart To Five by Simon Stephenson

48) The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey

49) A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

50) Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

51) Deacon King Kong by James McBride

52) Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

53) Agency by William Gibson

54) The Fifth Season by J.K. Jemisin  

Partying Like It's 2020

 

I can't really complain about this New Year's Eve . . . I got the kids to play darts with me while we listened to Beck and "The Chronic" and I drank beer . . . while it's not the Pub, it was pub-like . . . but we're about to consume some homemade ravioli so I think this is going to be an early night.

2020 Winds Down . . .

2020 is winding down in typical form:

1) I wanted to heat up my leftover half-burrito last night and when I opened the aluminum foil I found the roll to be empty-- one of the children finished the foil and then put the box back-- and since foil is required to heat up a burrito ( I wasn't going to risk it in our brand new air-fryer) I had to go to the store and it was busy;

2) though I've only got eighty pages left, I'm not sure sure I'm going to finish my 54th book (2020 was a good year for reading books) because I might abandon it . . . it's a fantasy novel by J.K. Jemisin called The Fifth Season and the subtitle is "Every Age Must Come to An End" and it won the Hugo Award in 2016 so I thought it would be a fitting end to this weird and stunted year but it's a bit too apocalyptic and cruel and depressing . . . though it's set in an alternate universe of fissures and tsunamis and volcanoes and an oppressed group of "orogenes," people with the ability to sense and manipulate the wild and restless thermal and kinetic energy that is par for the course in this world-- they can quiet these disasters . . . or set them off-- now that I'm summarizing, I realize it is a pretty great book-- just painful-- and I will probably finish it because of the last kick in the balls from 2020;

3) it is raining and it is going to rain and it will continue raining until well into the New Year.

It's Never To Late to Listen to Wonder

While I was hiking with the dog this morning (hiking with the dog, online chess, drinking beer, and indoor tennis are my go-to activities during this pandemic winter break) I learned something: 

I have not listened to nearly enough Stevie Wonder

and I learned this from an excellent podcast . . . Lost Notes:1980;

the host is poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib and in each episode, he takes a deep dive into something musical; the Stevie Wonder piece is excellent and the story of "Louie Louie" is mind-boggling-- I had no idea.

Does Dave Possess Agency?

Agency is book two of William Gibson's "Jackpot" trilogy and while it's not as difficult a read as the first (The Peripheral) it is still unnerving because nobody is where or when they seem; the jackpot is only a prize for those who survived this ironically named ecopolitical apocalypse in the near future-- those who made it to the other side of the pandemics and massive climate change and political fallout enjoy a world recovering: low population, greater technology, and some methods of reversing the damage humanity has done; there is also massive quantum computing and through this "server" those rich and powerful enough can send information backward and forward through time-- so it's a time travel story, but even more complicated than Primer . . . no one is where and when they seem-- powerful folks in the future start new "stubs" when they contact and meddle with the past, which they do in drones, with AI, and in various networks-- the perspectives shift rapidly-- you could be in 2136, occupying a drone in 2017-- you could be in 2017, embodying a peripheral in 2136-- and you could be relaying information back and forth, changing timelines in the past and future as you relay information and technology . . . you might be a government agency doing this, a rogue agency, you might be a corrupt plutocrat from "the klept," or even disembodied AI with agency . . . I've read the entire William Gibson ouvre and I trust him implicitly as an author, that's why I hung in with these two books-- and while there aren't giant epiphanic revelations at the end, you get the hang of the way things work (in the same time frame as the characters, often) and I'm interested in how he finishes this subtle exploration of free will and determinism turned on its head.

Xmas 2020: The Weird and the Mundane

On Christmas Eve, we met Catherine's brother and her niece (and her niece's boyfriend and their dog) down at the Asbury Park Dog Beach-- while the weather was warm in Highland Park, it was a different story at the shore and the boys and I were underdressed . . . you might notice I'm the one wearing sandals) and while that get-together had the usual pandemic weirdness about it, Christmas morning felt just like always . . . and I know that this year we're lucky to have it that way and for that, I am very grateful.