Niklas's thoughts

Tidö ministers to the left: Ebba Busch, Ulf Kristersson, Jimmie Åkesson. Gellert Tamas to the right.

From Gellert Tamas's great newspaper article that was published yesterday; translation errors are all mine:

The prohibition against retroactive legislation is considered so fundamental that it is enshrined in the constitution through the Instrument of Government 2:10, in the same way that it is included as Article 11:2 in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 in New York.

“Stricter and clearer requirements regarding conduct for residence permits” is the latest example of the Tidö government's complete indifference to these fundamental legal principles. What they are proposing is, in fact, to turn the entire legal system upside down. Previously, certain carefully defined criminal acts could result in a deportation order; now, they instead want to focus on individual people's “conduct,” in other words their “behavior and way of life,” to quote the definition of the word in the Swedish Academy Glossary.

According to the referral to the Council on Legislation, now not only criminal acts, including “less serious, for example, isolated offenses punishable by fines,” will be able to lead to deportation, but also an individual's opinions and personal contacts; “for example, support for international terrorism, extremist sympathies, or connections to a violent extremist organization.” All of this is based on the concept of “otherwise flawed conduct,” which is defined as a person, for example, “incurring debt without any intention or effort to pay back the debts” or as “violations of rules, statutes, and authority decisions, for example, welfare fraud, undeclared work, or failing to pay fines.”

Furthermore, retroactive legislation is permitted; or as the government puts it: “In each individual case, a comprehensive assessment is made that also takes into account any previous flawed character.” What the government is doing is simply turning the concepts upside down: From the fundamental idea of the principle of legality that everything that is not forbidden, at least purely legally, is permitted, to that everything the individual does or has done, regardless of the wording of the law, can be considered forbidden – if the Swedish Migration Agency's character assessment finds it to be so.

The Tidö government has simply drafted a catch-all clause that most of all resembles the legislation in the former communist one-party states. There, they admittedly did not use the concept of “character” but rather “antisocial lifestyle” and the legislation was not primarily directed at “immigrants” but at domestic dissidents, but the goal is and was the same: To give the state and its institutions as far-reaching tools as possible to harass and ultimately get rid of unwanted individuals.

To illustrate the almost Kafkaesque structure of the proposed legislation, we can do the thought experiment that it had also applied to Swedish citizens. How would the government's character assessment, for example, have affected the responsible persons behind the proposal?

Johan Forsell, Minister for Migration, has obvious “connections to a violent extremist organization” through his son's previous membership in the openly Nazi Aktivklubb Sverige. Members of the organization, which Säpo assesses as one of the country's most prone to violence, carried out several brutal assaults on so-called “immigrants” exactly during the time that the son was a member. Forsell's defense; that it is about “a deeply remorseful 15-year-old, who just turned 16” would hardly have impressed in a character investigation. The assessment, based on the wording in his own legislative proposal, could only have been one: Out he goes!

The same would have happened to Jimmie Åkesson. If he had defended the invitation of a leader of a criminal motorcycle gang to his wedding, with the justification that he was only a plus one, the Character Investigation's decision could only have been one, especially if it emerged that Åkesson's association with the motorcycle gang leader extended several years back in time: Deportation!

Ebba Busch has previously been convicted of a serious crime; gross defamation. Thus, it would hardly have mattered how many falukorv sausages she waved around to show her Swedishness; the decision would still have been the same: Out she goes!

Even Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's character assessment would probably have gone very quickly. The man who acquires a large apartment in central Stockholm, despite the fact that according to the owning foundation it is solely intended for threatened women, should not be long-lasting in Sweden.

The Conduct Investigation decision on immediate deportation would not have been difficult to make – with the justification that Kristersson had shown evidence of “behaviors that society on an overarching level counteracts”.

The examples above may seem absurd, but this is exactly how bizarrely the government's referral to the Council on Legislation is formulated. According to some calculations, up to 100,000 people with residence permits could be covered by the law, many of them having lived in Sweden for years, with an income and steady job, with children born and raised here.

The Tidö government's proposal is the latest in a bombardment of laws and legislative proposals – from the billion-kronor investment in repatriation grants to the teenage deportations – with the stated or unstated goal of not only reducing immigration but also getting out as many of those who are already here. And the government seems to completely ignore the criticism, which is as recurring as it is devastating. The Chancellor of Justice noted, for example, that previous proposals to revoke granted residence permits violate international law, while the Faculty of Law at Uppsala University summarized its criticism with the words: “[T]he inquiry's proposal [is] in conflict with the principles that make up Swedish administrative law and Swedish legal certainty. Opening up to make such a departure from the foundations of Swedish administrative law to achieve a political goal is dangerous and damages the Swedish rule of law.”

In the Middle Ages, banishment was considered one of the severest punishments the state authorities could mete out, intended only for the most heinous of crimes; such as murder or treason.

#Tidö #Sweden #politics #xenophobia #JimmieÅkesson #UlfKristersson #EbbaBusch #GellertTamas

From Scott Meslow's brilliant new book A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks, here is a wonderfully told story about Denise Bryson, the trans person played by David Duchovny in Twin Peaks.

Note: the passages below contain certain spoilers.

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Denise Bryson’s reputation precedes her. When Cooper learns that Bryson, his former partner in an Oakland drug bust, has been brought in as the DEA’s point person on the missing cocaine he’s accused of stealing, he’s delighted. Denise is “one of the finest minds in the DEA,” says Cooper. “Harry, we’re in very good hands.” But when Denise walks into the room, Cooper hardly recognizes her. When they’d worked together in Oakland, Denise—a trans woman—had not yet transitioned. Cooper, caught off-guard, calls her by her deadname. “It’s a long story, but actually, I prefer Denise, if you don’t mind,” says Denise, smiling. And to Twin Peaks’ eternal credit, Cooper’s response is, “Okay.” It would be inaccurate to say that Twin Peaks nailed trans representation when Denise was introduced in 1990, though its small-town characters are believably awkward in what you must assume is their first encounter with a trans person. In the scene that follows, Hawk declines to shake Denise’s outstretched hand, and Truman makes a crack under his breath about how the Great Northern, where Denise is staying, is in for a real surprise. But Cooper—recognized by then, by the audience, as the show’s paragon of moral rightness—is unquestioningly accepting of Denise’s identity. She hasn’t been in the room for thirty seconds before they’ve moved on to more important business: the particulars of Cooper’s drug case and the high quality of breakfast at the Great Northern.

To hear Duchovny tell it, he only landed the role because another, more famous actor turned it down. “I believe that my part was inspired by James Spader and written for him,” said Duchovny. “He wasn’t able to do it, and I was looking for any job I could get. It wasn’t like, ‘Gee, I’m a fan of Twin Peaks.’” Casting director Johanna Ray recalls multiple men arriving in drag for their audition to play Denise. Duchovny didn’t go that far, but he acknowledges his first attempt to play Denise was more over-the-top. “I must have auditioned much more stereotypically effeminate, and then when I put on the makeup and everything, it became clear to me that less was more,” he said.

After that initial introduction at the Sheriff’s Department, Twin Peaks largely does right by Denise. She explains that she realized she was a woman during an undercover investigation, when she discovered she felt more at home in women’s clothing. There’s a quick, heartfelt moment when Cooper—in the midst of a heated conversation about the investigation—accidentally deadnames her. Denise quickly corrects him; he apologizes, she says it’s okay, and they both move on. But even as the show acknowledges her transness, Denise is equally defined, as Cooper told Harry and Hawk, by her intelligence as a law enforcement agent. She sees through the unconvincing attempt to frame Cooper immediately, and masterminds the sting that leads to the downfall of Jean Renault. This leads to a sequence in which Denise appears in drag as a man. “You can call me Dennis,” she says, walking into the room dressed as a stereotypical businessman—not because of any social pressure, but because it’s a role she thinks might be useful in infiltrating Renault’s camp. Still, it’s Denise being a woman that saves the day; wearing the uniform of a Double R Diner waitress, Denise holds Renault’s attention just long enough to pass a gun to Cooper.

Denise appears for just one scene in Twin Peaks: The Return, but it’s one of the show’s most memorable—so much so that it’s routinely quoted by people who haven’t seen a frame of Twin Peaks. When Gordon Cole announces his intention to launch an investigation in Buckhorn, South Dakota, he needs to clear it with his superior officer: Denise Bryson, who has climbed the ladder to become the FBI’s chief of staff. It’s in this scene that Gordon Cole, played by Lynch himself, gets the last word on Denise—one that was almost instantly adopted as a rallying cry by the LGBTQ+ community and its supporters. “When you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die,” says Gordon. “I said, ‘We’ve got to bring [Denise] back. And I think she’s the head of the FBI,’” says Mark Frost. “But I’ll give David the credit. He came up with ‘Fix your hearts or die.’ I’ve seen people carrying that poster at protests over the last few months. There are probably hundreds of tattoos.”

#TwinPeaks #TV #video #DavidLynch #MarkFrost #ScottMeslow

I'm reading a coming biography about Elliott Smith, named Nobody Broke Your Heart: An Intimate Biography of Elliott Smith.

So far, I've only read the introduction. It bears the hallmarks of a great fucking book.

Twenty-three years after his death, Elliott still isn’t particularly well known, or well understood, but he is terribly loved. The task of understanding and preserving his legacy has become a collective project. There are YouTube accounts like I Remember Elliott; his old fan site Sweet Adeline, defiantly mired in Web 1.0; oral-history blogs like so flawed and drunk and perfect still; Smiling at Confusion, a site for posting guitar tabs, guidance on fingerings and chords. Fans share bootleg recordings and unreleased songs, reflections on his lyrics or entreaties for help understanding them, and they speculate darkly on his death. Below videos you’ll find hundreds of comments, people gushing over Elliott’s fingerpicking, arguing about whether he’s on something at this concert or just tired but clean, thanking him for accompanying them through depression or addiction, for making them feel less alone.

What is immediate, what is human, that is love.

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Recently, a friend asked me to run some of their works through AI to see what it would create. Instantly it generated some seemingly worthwhile stuff but in actuality, AI is autocorrect on steroids. My friend isn't very knowledgeable around AI but they produce stuff that's, frankly, some of the best I've ever read and heard in their 'fields'.

Three recent articles about AI:

• AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
• Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender
• The AI Industry Is Lying To You

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein is one of my favourite modern philosophers. I highly recommend Ray Monk's beautiful Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.

A recently-published article on large language models (LLMs) as they relate to Wittgenstein's views on language, semantics, and mathematics is very interesting indeed.

When Wittgenstein referred to the “beginning of the end of humanity,” he was not envisioning sci-fi cataclysms on the order of The Matrix or The Terminator or even Dr. Strangelove. He was referring to the end of humanity not primarily in terms of its biological survival, but in terms of what he called the “form of life” we inhabit. That form of life is threatened not so much by industrialization, nukes, robots, or AI agents as by a way of thinking that lowers human life to the plane of science and technology. Wittgenstein’s attempt to draw attention to that way of thinking—and dissuade us from it—is of the utmost importance in an era where the developing AI ideology threatens to further distort our understanding of how we use language and how we live.

A more in-depth excerpt from the wondrously and sharply written article:

The parts of the Investigations where Wittgenstein probes our concepts of thinking and understanding can help us escape the conceptual muddles that plague discussions and debates over AI and so-called “artificial general intelligence.”

“One of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment,” according to Wittgenstein, arises when a noun like “meaning” or “number” “makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.” We assume that our language works principally by way of reference, so that where there is a noun there must be a thing it points to. But referring to objects is just one of language’s many functions or games. Instead of looking for the things behind our words, Wittgenstein proposes studying the grammar of the language game: the role words play—and don’t play—in these activities.

When we reflect on words like “meaning,” “thinking,” “understanding,” and “reasoning,” Wittgenstein argues, a certain picture immediately enters our heads: an internal process existing in the brain or mind that enables or somehow gives life to outwardly meaningful expressions. But, Wittgenstein asks, “What really comes before our mind when we understand a word?” Is it a kind of picture, so that I see an image of a pen in my mind’s eye when I hear the word “pen”? Do I then compare my inner picture to my experience of the outer world in order to determine whether it would be appropriate to use the word “pen”? Does some correspondence between this internal process and my expression “pen” somehow constitute the meaning?

The idea of meaning as an internal process seems unproblematic at first, even unavoidable, but, as Wittgenstein shows, it’s not clear what role such a process would actually be playing. He asks his reader, for example, to “say: ‘Yes, this pen is blunt. Oh well, it’ll do.’ First, with thought; then without thought; then just think the thought without the words.” Having conducted these absurd self-examinations, Wittgenstein asks us to reflect, “What did the thought, as it existed before its expression, consist in?”

His point is that our intuitive idea of meaning as an inner correlate of our outward expressions breaks down when it is taken as something like a scientific theory for what’s really going on when we use language. This failure shouldn’t surprise us. Our language did not evolve for scientific or metaphysical purposes, but just to help us make do and get along in the real world.

The picture of thought as an internal process accompanying our use of language is just that: a picture. It is unproblematic insofar as it arises in everyday language, as when I clarify a misunderstanding by telling you, after you’ve mistakenly handed me a red pen on the desk, “No, I meant that blue pen on the bookshelf.” But that sentence is not a claim about the state of my brain a moment ago; it could not be confirmed or disconfirmed by some kind of retroactive brain scan. It’s merely a way to advance a practical project that has gone off the rails. If it’s anywhere, meaning is in that project, not in my brain.

Of course, we might imagine that some industrious cognitive scientist equipped with the latest in brain-imaging technology might actually try to establish a causal connection between a particular brain state and the correct usage of the word “pen.” But even in that case, would it be correct to say that with a coordinated set of brain images we’ve in some sense located the meaning of the word “pen”? In what sense would the internal state that shows up on the scan explain the use or understanding of the word? Would it be analogous to the way the properties of an internal combustion engine can help explain the forward motion of a car?

This example shows how strange it is to use an examination of brain states instead of actual behavior as a criterion for ascribing understanding. If we’re looking for understanding and meaning, Wittgenstein thinks, we will find them in the various things we do with language and not in some internal process that accompanies our use of language.

This is just one of the strategies Wittgenstein uses to try to dissuade his readers from a mechanical, pseudoscientific understanding of language as it is embedded in human practices. The Investigations doesn’t attempt to refute this false understanding by formal, analytic argumentation the way a scientist or science-imitating philosopher might. Wittgenstein instead tries to show its limitations. His makeshift strategies—describing language games, imagining dialogues, conducting thought experiments, and drawing analogies—show how the scientific worldview has strayed from narrowly defined areas where it actually has purchase and started to distort our understanding of domains where it doesn’t belong.

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It all reminds me of Noam Chomsky's discussion with Michel Gondry in the documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?. The documentary is packed with discussion on matters like universal grammar, but I remember Chomsky talking about how a small child can see a tall man who's happy; the child immediately knows that man is happy, and can draw parallels that allow the child to equally immediately know that not every man who is tall is happy, nor that every man is happy. The two-year-old Watumull/Roberts/Chomsky article The False Promise of ChatGPT says much about this.

It's not hard to know where happiness is found. To experience happiness is another thing, and AI won't help us there.

#ArtificialIntelligence #music #ElliottSmith #NoamChomsky #LudwigWittgenstein

David Stubbs tells the following words which are culled from his brilliant book Future Days. This passage mostly tells us about an action courtesy of Nikel Pallat, the manager for music group Ton Steine Scherben.

There were others, however, including Nikel Pallat, manager of hard-leftist polemical rockers Ton Steine Scherben, who regarded Kaiser as a typical have-it-both-ways liberal bullshitter. This schism came to a head in a televised debate involving the pair on a WDR talkshow in 1971, whose discussion went under the heading ‘Pop & Co – Die “andere” Musik zwischen Protest und Markt’ (‘Pop & Co. – The “Other” Music between Protest and Marketplace’), which can be viewed on YouTube. Its period quaintness lies not just in the length of the hair of the participants, the studio smoking or the orangeness of Kaiser’s jumper, which merely to look at is to overdose on Vitamin C. It’s in the admirably earnest accommodation of those discussing the feasibility and possibility of the overthrow of capitalism through rock music. As Kaiser seeks to dampen this far-left yearning, the debate begins to heat up. Translated, the action runs as follows.

‘Societal change will come in an evolutionary process,’ says Kaiser. ‘That isn’t something that’ll happen tomorrow, but a development that will take probably a hundred years.’ He points out that immediate change was the illusion of the people who marched in the 1960s, important though these protests were. Pallat angrily dismisses this Fabian talk of slow, evolutionary progress, suggesting that it amounts to support for continued oppression.

‘You are working for the oppressor, not against the oppressor. Do you realise that?’ Kaiser defends himself, saying that one has to understand how the media work. ‘Who are you working for?’ retorts Pallat, sharply.

‘You cannot dispute that you are working for the capitalist.’ ‘Who do you represent here?’ comes back Kaiser, with equal sharpness. ‘Don’t you think the TV isn’t also a capitalist organ?’ (Here the moderator intervenes to point out that Kaiser isn’t speaking on behalf of TV.)

It’s all too much for Pallat. ‘Here we have TV making this shit-liberal programme we’re having an opportunity to go on about anti-materialism – socialism … we shouldn’t speak about evolution but revolution, yeah? And objectively nothing is changing about oppression. TV is a tool of oppression by general society. And that’s why it is completely obvious that if something should still happen, then one has to stand against the oppressor and not be neutral … and that’s why I am going to destroy this table now.’

Whereupon, true to his word, he produces from his inside jacket pocket an axe and, snarling and swearing, commences to bash the table as the rest of the panellists edge away in consternation. It is not so much the table towards which he bears a grudge but its symbolic role as polite vortex of sedentary, liberal consensus. Once he has completed his attempted assault on the offending piece of furniture, which proves remarkably resistant to his ferocious efforts, he says, ‘So, let’s continue our discussion.’ No one else, however, is inclined to do so.

Taking full advantage of the freedom temporarily afforded him by his axe to do as he pleases, he gathers up the microphones abandoned on what’s left of the table and stuffs them into his pockets, announcing that he is commandeering them for the oppressed. ‘I need the microphones for the young people who are sitting in jail.’

The resilience of the table is a metaphor of sorts for the resilience of a certain leftist strain of German tolerance and liberality at that time, whose broadmindedness and reasonableness was capable of withstanding even axe attack. The very fact that Pallat had an axe about his person in the studio suggests to the cynical an element of premeditation to his outburst. Nonetheless, as insurrectionary television goes, it rather puts the Sex Pistols and Bill Grundy in the shade.

Alongside Can and Faust, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld also listed Ton Steine Scherben as one of the seventies German groups he most admired. On the strength of this performance, it’s not hard to see why. It shows also the depth of feeling and revolutionary commitment that had seized the hearts and minds of the more radical young Germans, as well as Kaiser’s ability to put people’s backs up.

#music #destruction #Germany #video #politics #BlixaBargeld #EinsturzendeNeubauten

Stop. Listen.

Tirakat is a very funky album. From the album description:

Tirakat brings together Jakarta-based trio Ali and Lebanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Charif Megarbane in a collaboration shaped by long-standing cultural exchange between Indonesia and the Arab world. Ali’s blend of 1970s Indonesian psychedelic funk, Melayu traditions, disco grooves and Arab melodic forms meets Charif’s long-running exploration of cross-regional sound, rooted in a shared musical vocabulary rather than genre.

Bar the hardcore rock and hip-hop, this is how Beastie Boys could have sounded if they'd grown up in Jakarta and Lebanon instead of the USA.

This is inventive, extremely groovy, and romantic. Strings mingling with fuzzed guitars and beats that would make any hip-hop producer salivate? Just check out the track 'Pejokan Funk'. You want a hazy, arpeggio-riddled harpsichord dream track set to the oboe and sitar? Try 'SILK END'.

Don't sleep on this. Buy or stream it via this page.

#music #funk #groovy #soul #HabibiFunk

I've looked for a band to make me stop wishing Alvvays would release a new album like Blue Rev. That won't happen but having said that, Brink, the new album by Girl Scout, is very good.

There are many guitar-based melodies and the singer is nearly as good as the lead singer in Alvvays. Differ'nt strokes, y'all.

I'm such a sucker for good guitar-based music.

#music

This is a LinkedIn post by a charming person with whom I used to work. The person uses English as their first language.

This is a Pangram analysis of the entire LinkedIn post: the entire post is most likely generated by AI.

This is a reaction on the post. A person whom I respect claims to love the post.

What does the post say about the human who published the post? About the one who loved the post?

Every human makes mistakes. However, using AI turns off thought, often and notably critical thought. A six-month-old human innately reflects and learns; AI is just autocorrect on steroids, built on top of a fraction of the data that passes through an average human during a day.

The more humans use a sycophantic bullshit generator, the more they succumb to its allure. This is natural in bullshit.

Amazon now mandate AI-generated code as used by junior and mid-level programmers to be reviewed before it crashes their own systems.

Microsoft own LinkedIn. The Microsoft CEO claims to only use AI chatbots instead of reading email, which should result in getting fired.

Alas, here we are. AI has its uses, but is rarely worth it, mainly because a single AI interaction takes a monumental toll on the climate and often results in erroneous results.

If people would ask strangers on the street about certain things, they might get wrong answers. Would those people be sycophants and liars? Maybe, but it's not likely that they would make the repetitive and idiot-like 'mistakes' that are made by popular AI chatbots that are trained on mainly stolen data.

Would you befriend AI?

#ArtificialIntelligence

Just as Miley Cyrus could potentially be seen as 'bad' for covering a Cocteau Twins song, that is, to me, not even interesting to consider.

First, it's obvious that Miley loves the track. Second, I love her talk before and during the song; reverence is overrated. Third, the result is a gateway into the universe that is Cocteau Twins, and that, friends, is never bad.

This morning I read a well-conceived and -written book excerpt about the villain as concept. The book is Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV by Jack Balderrama Morley. The book excerpt is found in this LitHub post.

The excerpt starts by focusing on Heidi Montag, The Villain of fantastic TV series The Hills.

A villain is just Heidi Montag wanting to make money for being famous. She just wants to follow her own path. Her “flaws” are on the outside, and she’ll enumerate the ways in which she’s tried to fix them, not squirrel them away so they can do damage in the dark. Villains may not be perfect, but at least you know who they are.

Reality TV, despite all the moral hand-wringing and critical disdain surrounding it, has never really been so different from other kinds of American media. It fits neatly into the broader cultural landscape of torn social ties, disconnection and alienation, and the hunger for a life that feels more real and the belief that video somehow offers a cure.

The genre may actually be most similar to the televisual medium that sits on the opposite end of the respectability spectrum, vaunted as so critical to maintaining the American republic: the news.

Another excerpt:

Heidi is a storyteller. She conceives her lines and delivers them in the moment, reacting to the scripts of the people around her, such as the newscaster interviewing her.

Many have followed in Heidi’s steps—Christine Quinn, Donald Trump, the Kardashians—and they’ve been so successful because America had been heading in Heidi’s direction since its founding. She is the self- made soul, speaking the story of herself into existence, redefining the wilderness as she sees it, finding love and a home in the process.

This is the strange trajectory that hybrid homes get pushed along by the digital forces running through them. Video’s paranoia about the story of reality now runs through the places we live.

The Real World, Selling Sunset, the Kardashians shows, and The Bachelor show how homes are freighted with feelings, but they don’t explain why homes are just so foundational to the American psyche. Our homes, our selves. It might be a universal association, but Americans and their twisted economic system take it a step further. When it comes to your home, you have to own it, as any Real Housewife will tell you. It’s on their show that we start to see how deep the paranoia about reality runs.

The book seems to be extraordinarily well written. I will buy it.

#books #reality #TV #music

I do not like easy jazz. I don't know what is happening. Maybe I'm getting softer in my older fucking age or it's just that I'm appreciating a recording where you can hear playing not in the modern-classical jazz sense—i.e. fucking boring twiddling à la dreadfully-virtuosic-performer style—but instead how the piano hammers move inside a piano.

The EP Galileo by Luke Howard is a lovely EP where old-schooly piano playing meets a neo-classical sensibility.

I feel weirded out by myself: I actually like the 1940s-ish type of playing, how it twines with steady and quieter background chord thrums, while the Howard's right hand louder plays melodies and curlicues.

Fuck me, this is nice. I can't remember a single song name nor a single melody but I just like this shit. To me, this is a pleasant take on romantic piano playing in jazz. This is everything that the Downton Abbey scriptwriter should have wanted to do and failed to do. This is made with feeling and does not at all feel like it's written by AI, thank Bog. Get in.

#piano #music #jazz

The book has an intriguing intro:

Between 1835 and 1842, scandal tightened around two clergymen in the Baltic port city of Königsberg. It destroyed their reputations, drove them out of their jobs and into prison, and banished them from public life. Their legal exoneration of the most serious charges against them came too late to reverse the damage. I have been thinking about this small vortex of turbulence ever since I happened on the relevant files in the early 1990s. The campaign of denunciations and rumour that took down the Lutheran preachers Johann Ebel and Heinrich Diestel belongs to an age before the advent of paparazzi, radio, television and digital social media, but that is precisely what endows their story with fabular power. Resemblances to present-day persons and situations, though not intended, cannot be ruled out.

Ooh! Witchy start!

The book is #1 in LitHub's best-reviewed nonfiction list for this week.

#book #reading #quote