If your political tendencies disinclined you to favor the U.S. presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, you might be tempted to think that for all its initial implausibility, it’s in retrospect not that tough to explain: Trump’s doubters simply underestimated a contempt for reality and depth of bigotry among Republican Party voters. It’s an inversion of Trump’s apparent view of himself, really: His haters couldn’t comprehend how much true-believing Americans would love him for his authenticity, decisiveness, and straight-shooting demolition of nonsense.

Speaking on Thursday at the Aspen Ideas festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, however, Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute argued for separating out the broad, complex forces behind the current rise of populism in the U.S. and the narrow, contingent reasons for Trump’s success in picking off the GOP nomination. “There are are a couple of black-swan events that happened here,” Brooks said.

[…]

According to New America’s Anne Marie Slaughter, for all the Trump campaign has used xenophobia and other modes of bigotry to draw out support from radical elements of the Republican base, they are not the real catalysts of populist revolt on the American right today. The real catalysts are a set of deep disruptions in the American economy—a constellation of forces that also accounts for much of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, as far as it’s gone.

“What we are seeing is anger at a disruption of our economy and, really, our social order—of the magnitude we saw when the agricultural age gave way to the industrial age,” Slaughter says:

When the industrial age completely upended the way people lived and worked, from small cottage-industry, farming villages to going to factories, in another place from your family, to work—which is the same kind of profound upheaval we’re seeing now, we got Marxism. We got Marxism, and then we got World War I, and then we got World War II—that upheaval … was a direct outgrowth of the changes wrought by the industrial revolution.

That is what we are seeing the beginnings of today. The digital revolution … is completely upending how we work, what the sources of value are, how people can support their families, if they can at all, and creates tremendous fear and rage in the sense that you are at the mercy of forces you cannot control.

Why Is Populism Taking Over the Republican Party? – The Atlantic

There’s a fun game I like to play in a group of trusted friends called “Controversial Opinion.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk about what was shared during Controversial Opinion afterward and you aren’t allowed to “argue” — only to ask questions about why that person feels that way. Opinions can range from “I think James Bond movies are overrated” to “I think Donald Trump would make a excellent president.”

Usually, someone responds to an opinion with, “Oh my god! I had no idea you were one of those people!” Which is really another way of saying “I thought you were on my team!”

The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb. — Medium

[Just a lovely little short film. -egg]

What happens when an artist asks the co-host of Radiolab (and a composer) to explain the significance of sound and music.

Watch a beautiful meditation on the function of music – cdm createdigitalmusic

Van Gogh’s World Seen Through the Perspective of a Tilt-Shift Lens

Picasso and Matisse Trade Blows in a Cubism vs. Fauvism Bar Brawl

An ex-military photographer, Aaron Ansarov retired from the Navy in 2007, transforming his skills to create commercial work for magazines and focus on his own practice. Fascinated with marine life since his days growing up in Central Florida, his series “Zooids,” focuses on detailed images of Portuguese Man o’ War. Ansarov photographs the creatures on a homemade light table while alive, then immediately releases them back into the wild where they were found.

Once shot and the Man o’ War are returned, each image receives minimal manipulation, as Ansarov makes only slight adjustments to the photograph’s exposure, contrast, and vibrancy to highlight the vivid details of each venomous siphonophore. The completed works are otherworldly, appearing like alien illustrations rather than portraits, with deep blues, purples, and pinks unfurling in every direction. You can see more of Ansarov’s illuminated images on Facebook and Instagram. (viaFubiz)

Source: Illuminated Portraits of Live Portuguese Man o’ War Captured by Aaron Ansarov | Colossal

Given the misogynistic imagery that saturated “Gangster of Love,” it’s easy to understand why Miller would be uncomfortable when he heard his 1973 recording of “The Joker” (its four-bar slide-guitar solo looped fifty-four times in the mix) providing the rhythm and chorus for such an uncouth song. To listen to “Gangster of Love” for the first time was pretty much inseparable from the shock one felt at its vulgarity, and even the favorable media reviews for The Geto Boys in 1990 took specific exception to the song’s lyrics. (“This track spends a solid five minutes viciously denigrating women,” wrote a Rolling Stone critic. “There’s no excuse — literary, comedic or otherwise — for this kind of malice.”) Furthermore, Miller’s decision to sue the Geto Boys could not be chalked up to some racist loathing for hip-hop, since he hadn’t protested when black rap artists like Too $hort, N.W.A, and the Jungle Brothers had sampled his songs around the same time.

Nevertheless, Miller’s move to disallow the use of his song in “Gangster of Love” did carry racial undertones. When the white, Milwaukee-born rocker croons “call me the gangster of love” on “The Joker,” he is actually echoing a line from his 1968 cover of a different “Gangster of Love” arrangement — a blues tune originally recorded in 1957 by a black, Texas-born musician named Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Under American copyright law, a Houston bluesman like Watson couldn’t prevent Miller from recording a cover of his song, yet Miller was perfectly within his rights to restrict a quartet of Houston gangsta rappers from sampling his lyrical allusion to the Watson original.

Source: The Slippery Slope of Musical Appropriation

After nearly 40 years of illegal use as a recording studio, an abandoned water tank near Rangely, considered one of the sonic wonders of the world, goes legit as The Tank Center for Sonic Arts.

Source: A rusting water tank in the Colorado desert emerges as one of the sonic wonders of the world

[Great interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Although it’s hardly a central theme of the interview, I really appreciated his comment on Obama:]

How would you describe the eight years of Obama’s presidency?

I think he did a tremendous job, and I say that with all my criticism of how he talks about black folks and how he talks to black folks. I say that with all my criticism of the morality or the lack of morality in terms of drone warfare. You’re not voting for a civil rights leader; you’re voting for a president of the United States within the boundaries of what presidents do. And within the boundaries of what presidents do, he’s easily the greatest president in my lifetime. I don’t think people understand what he had to navigate. It’s a hard job already. You’ve got people on TV—and this is just the small end of it—on the internet, everywhere, sending out pictures of you and your wife looking like apes. You’ve got officials in the opposing party e-mailing pictures of watermelon patches in front of the White House. You have an opposition party where somewhere on the order of 50 or 60 percent don’t think you are legally president. You’re giving the State of the Union address and some white dude from South Carolina stands up and yells, “You lie.” Just open, blatant disrespect. You say the most sensible things in the world and people lose their mind, almost scuttling your top agenda in terms of legislation. You’ve got to be a certain motherfucker to be able to manage all that in your head. Their leading presidential candidate right now is the person who claimed our president was born somewhere else and asked to see his grades. You’re dealing with a party where racism is a significant undercurrent. I mean, whew.

Source: The Playboy Interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates | Playboy

[Just a terrific essay on K-Dot and the traditions of Black blues. -egg]

“There’s a certain kind of American story that is characterized by a laconic surface and a tight-lipped speaking voice. The narrator in this story has been made inarticulate by modern life. Vulnerable to his own loneliness, he is forced into an attitude of hard-boiled self-protection,” writes Vivian Gornick in her essay “Tenderhearted Men,” in which she takes to task the terse, unchanging masculinity of Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus. Gornick, however, could just as easily be writing about the emotional impasse found in hip-hop.

A few months ago, when Kendrick Lamar released his album good kid m.A.A.d city, it excited all of the critics who get paid good money to not get too excited. They were mesmerized by the album’s narrative arc and the power of Lamar’s storytelling. The cosigns and cameos Lamar had received from his Compton godfathers Dr. Dre and MC Eiht impressed them. Lamar’s first major label release wasn’t just good — it also had the strange fatalism of a plaintive, grave, 25-year-old man-child unafraid to sound all Septimus Smith with his anxieties, to break open the status quo’s “laconic surface” with his youthful vulnerability. He is young, but also old enough to know that nothing in life is promised for men like him except death. So, on the album’s strongest song, he asks for only one thing and it recalls the blues elegies of Son House and Robert Johnson: “When the lights shut off, and it is my turn to settle down, promise that you will sing about me.”

Source: When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative – Los Angeles Review of Books

[A tremendously good 1987 essay on hundreds of years of attempts to control the Mississippi River, and where those attempts stand now. -egg]

When Rabalais was a child, there was no navigation lock to lower ships from the Mississippi. The water just poured out—boats with it—and flowed on into a distributary waterscape known as Atchafalaya. In each decade since about 1860, the Atchafalaya River had drawn off more water from the Mississippi than it had in the decade before. By the late nineteen-forties, when Rabalais was in his teens, the volume approached one-third. As the Atchafalaya widened and deepened, eroding headward, offering the Mississippi an increasingly attractive alternative, it was preparing for nothing less than an absolute capture: before long, it would take all of the Mississippi, and itself become the master stream. Rabalais said, “They used to teach us in high school that one day there was going to be structures up here to control the flow of that water, but I never dreamed I was going to be on one. Somebody way back yonder—which is dead and gone now—visualized it. We had some pretty sharp teachers.”

The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Mississippi’s main channel of three thousand years ago is now the quiet water of Bayou Teche, which mimics the shape of the Mississippi. Along Bayou Teche, on the high ground of ancient natural levees, are Jeanerette, Breaux Bridge, Broussard, Olivier—arcuate strings of Cajun towns. Eight hundred years before the birth of Christ, the channel was captured from the east. It shifted abruptly and flowed in that direction for about a thousand years. In the second century a.d., it was captured again, and taken south, by the now unprepossessing Bayou Lafourche, which, by the year 1000, was losing its hegemony to the river’s present course, through the region that would be known as Plaquemines. By the nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it. By the route of the Atchafalaya, the distance across the delta plain was a hundred and forty-five miles—well under half the length of the route of the master stream.

Source: Atchafalaya – The New Yorker