Inclinations and Hesitations

As I begin writing this post the Boston Celtics and Detroit Pistons should be tipping off for Game Three of their Eastern Conference Finals series. As per my vow in a prior post, I haven't watched any of the games so far nor will I do so unless the Celtics win a road game, and thanks to the Pistons' victory in Game Two the Cs have to win at least one road game in this series if they want to advance to the NBA Finals. In any case, the series features two of the more intriguing NBA personalities of the last decade, two players who've caught my attention since I'm always on the lookout for that strange animal, the incredibly successful underachiever.

Rasheed Wallace has long been one of my favorite players in the league, but he's also one of the most disappointing - as disappointing as the most talented and important player on a championship team can be, by the unfair standards to which we hold our athletic heroes. Most suited to the 4-spot, able to log extended minutes at the 3 or the 5, Sheed has all the skills necessary to be one of the greatest bigs of all time, especially one of the greatest non-center bigs. He's not close, a borderline Hall of Famer at best. There's nobody in the league who's better at man defense on an opposing big (when the overrated Ben Wallace was his teammate and getting consideration as the Defensive Player of the Year, it was usually Sheed's job to guard the superior big man on the other team, letting Ben sag off of his man and play free agent help defense). He's also a skilled help defender and a highly intelligent one; stories from the year that Sheed joined the Pistons mid-season (and went on to win the title) have him vocally anchoring the defense by calling out the proper rotations and identifying the other team's plays. On the other end he has effective range out to the three point line to go with a strong post-game - not fabulous, but good enough because it features one unstoppable weapon, the Rasheed Wallace fadeaway turnaround jumper. The release point on the ball is somewhere around nine feet in the air falling away from you, and when it flies true it's one of (in my opinion) the prettiest shots in basketball, as well as being essentially unguardable. There's no athletic or skill-based reason why Rasheed shouldn't put up 25 points and 12 rebounds every night.

And yet - his career stats are 15 and 7, and this season he tossed up 12.7 and 6.6. Fundamentally, Rasheed Wallace shies away from being the focal point. He's happy being the most talented cog in a machine that doesn't rely on him to flex his talents. He floats out on the three point line, away from the heat of the action, and goes through long periods where he seems disengaged from the game (on offense, at least). He's capable of taking over the game and asserting himself as the most gifted and skilled player on his team (often on the floor) whenever he wants, but he rarely wants it. According to a Jemele Hill in a recent podcast with Bill Simmons, this is essentially what Wallace is like in his off-court life as well: capable of being engaging and charming but disinclined to be the center of attention, which is how Hill explains his well documented moodiness in the face of stories about his various charities, what a great teammate he is, and so forth. Wallace has every skill, but his personality won't let him dominate.

The other great underachiever (or so we think) in this series is Kevin Garnett, widely acclaimed as one of the great players of the modern era and generally presumed to be a first ballot Hall of Famer. Garnett is, physically, even more gifted - with length, speed, explosiveness - than Wallace, and has the same apparent intelligence in his game. And unlike Wallace, Garnett is always trying as hard as he can. He's an unselfish player, and there are times when he shrinks from the ball (which we'll come to), but he's giving maximal effort all the time.

And yet - he's not nearly as good as he should be, and I'll insist this to the grave. With his physical abilities and knowledge of the game he should (also) be the greatest 4 of all time (and can also spend extended minutes at the 3 or the 5), but I don't think he's nearly maximalized his skillset in the way that Wallace has. Garnett is, in my opinion, a superior help defender (his fiery intensity and physical explosiveness are key advantages over Wallace in this regard) but a couple of shades off Wallace as a man defender. The clear deficiency is that he doesn't nearly have the complement of skills Sheed has on the offensive end, despite being a better ballhandler, just as long, and much quicker. His range isn't as strong as Wallace's, but Garnett is deadly out to 18 feet. It's in the post game that he lacks; whereas Wallace uses a rich arsenal of moves and goes to the fadeaway as his trump card, Garnett has a limited set of moves and uses his turnaround as a bailout weapon. When Garnett should dropstep and juke his way into a layup, he surrenders positions and fades from the basket. And he used to work for Kevin McHale, who had the greatest set of post moves in basketball history. Something is weird there.

(Actually, my pet theory is that the fledgling and poorly managed Minnesota Timberwolves didn't know what to do with him and wrecked him by abusing his versatility. Garnett was capable of doing so many things for that team and they absolutely called on him to do every single one of them: be the best post defender, be the lead on-the-ball defender in Flip Saunders' zone, be the primary scoring option around the basket, be the best jump shooter, be the guy who runs the offense...he was never given the opportunity to focus his skillset and develop it in a particular direction; he could have been the evolutionary Kevin McHale or the evolutionary Scottie Pippen, and he kind of came out as two-thirds one and one-third the other, except not clearly better than either [in my opinion; I imagine many would disagree].)

The more common knock on Garnett is that he shies away from The Moment and doesn't have the desire (or the reproductive glands) to take the big shot, or take over in crunch time and score on five straight posessions. This article by Simmons generously suggests that part of the reason is that Garnett has never really had the opportunity to learn how to handle himself in the moments of greatest pressure. Playing on those crappy Minnesota teams, he didn't have the opportunity to make season-defining plays because the Timberwolves just weren't going to be in those situations anyway. Tim Duncan won a title in his second year, and rookie Kobe was airballing huge shots in the playoffs, a key part of the learning curve to make him one of the great clutch players of all time. Garnett, Simmons points out elsewhere, also plays all-out all the time, whereas most NBA players have learned that the grind of an 82 game season plus playoffs is too tiring and they must necessarily conserve their energy until the games (or quarters) when it really matters. Rasheed Wallace playing to the peak of his abilities might be a better player than Kevin Garnett, but it's hard to say because Wallace only plays at his peak for two or three minute stretches; Garnett seems to fall short because he has nowhere to elevate to. We see the best of Garnett for 38 minutes or so a night, every night.

(Yes, I think there's such a thing as clutch. And, to be honest, I don't think it's a rising to the occasion nearly as much as it is the mental fortitude to not shrink from the occasion.)

There is something Wallace-ish, though, in that I feel like Garnett is disinclined to take the winning shot; he wants to not take the losing shot more than he wants to take the winning one. Part of his maniacal effort is wrapped up (like Wallace's apparent distaste for the spotlight) in a somewhat idealistic manifestation of basketball as a Team game (where Garnett derived this I don't know, but Wallace learned it from Dean Smith at UNC). Garnett is aggressively looking for the open man, just as he aggressively looks for the offensive board, and like his unflagging effort this stays constant from the first minute to the last. This is why if the Celtics win a title with this team I bet the Finals MVP will be (will have to be) Paul Pierce, who isn't nearly as talented but, when he flips the "go to the basket" switch, has the confidence and attitude to take matters into his own hands.

Just because it's floated into my head, there's some vague similarity here to George Benson. People can dispute whether George Benson is the greatest jazz guitarist of all time (he's not nearly my favorite, but I think he probably is the best) but he absolutely should be. By modern standards, his technical chops are frightening, but by the standards of the time he hit the scene Benson was untouchable, his phrasing and time are impeccable and (rarely for a jazz guitarist) he swings as hard as the greatest horn players, his harmonic imagination is probably the least part of his playing but still strong, and his melodic improvisations are accessible (when they're not blazing by so quickly that all the ear registers is a blur). If he's not the greatest jazz guitarist, it's a technical disqualification for having such a limited career (sort of how Bill Walton should have been one of the greatest centers of all time but needs to drop several spots down the list because injuries kept his career from bearing out the breadth of his talent). Benson turned, fairly early, to singing (actually, he was a singer before he focused on the guitar) and drifted into very lucrative and popular smooth jazz/r&b, and has been disinclined to play jazz on record (he still shows up as a guest on other people's bandstands) ever since. His jazz abilities are still important to him, because Benson has talked about sharing the stage with McCoy Tyner and freaking out because he'd let his jazz chops get so rusty, and ever since he's made a point of practicing and playing enough straight jazz to be able to dominate anywhere, anytime. But he doesn't make the records, and doesn't appear to want to. I don't begrudge him his aesthetic choices over the years - if he likes the music he makes then he likes it, and he should keep doing it - and if he's focused on the smooth stuff to make a bunch of money, I respect that without question, but: he's got lots of money now! And it's not as though he needs to exclusively do one thing or the other; there's no reason he can't record an album of jazz standards and then turnaround and tour on "Breezin'", and we know he still cares about jazz because of the aforementioned chops-maintenance, not to mention his eagerness to get on stage with current jazz greats to begin with...I don't get it. He has all the ability in the world, but he seems to have no interest in putting it out there for our enjoyment. I don't want to say that it's selfish, because the music is his to do with what he wants, but I find it perplexing to say the least.

Huh. A quick check online shows Boston up 18 at the half.

What's To Stop You Or Me Or Them From Just Blowing Somebody Away?: Weeds, Season Two

"Death Row".

That exchange should have told DEA agent Peter Scottson (Martin Donovan) everything he needed to know about Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker); it's too late already, by the fourth episode of the season, but he should have known here.

This is actually a huge reach in terms of overanalyzing a single moment, but indulge me.

Now, the question she asks isn't actually that odd, considering that when she asks they're on a date at a shooting range. There are in fact a lot of people who have guns in the near vicinity. I've never been to a range, but I've wondered this myself - the actual obvious answer is probably something like "if you want to kill a bunch of people with a gun, it's easier to do it somewhere without a lot of other people carrying loaded guns." Peter's answer, "Death Row," is a lawman's answer, the sort of thing he needs to believe is true if he's going to do his job. We have laws and punishments and the punishments scare would-be criminals into not committing crimes and the system justifies itself. It's bullshit, of course, at least where crimes like mass murder are concerned. People might choose not to commit misdemeanors because they don't want to deal with the more minor annoyances of the criminal justice system, and maybe this has forestalled a few very personal murders (e.g., I'd kill my ex-spouse but I'd get caught), but by and large I believe that murder of any kind, and especially random mass killing, is the sort of activity that you're either going to do or you're not. If you tell yourself the reason you didn't take out the local 7-11 is because of death row, you're kidding yourself; you never really had it in you in the first place. (And, you know, that's a good thing.) Why do we tell ourselves that death row is a deterrent to others or ourselves? I'm not sure.

But in the context of the scene - where Nancy receives the answer flatly and appears to consider it seriously for a moment as though thinking, "Huh, that never occurred to me," it's telling. Nancy is all reaction - as Conrad (Romany Malco) tells her in a later episode, after she says that she's all out of moves, "You never had any." She's just been responding instinctively, and what we've learned is that in the right moment Nancy is capable of pretty much anything. She's like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, careless with other people's lives. She's a sociopath (I'm not spending the Wikipedia time to select between dissociative or antisocial personality disorders). She's a snake, and she's a monster.

This is the weird greatness of Weeds' second season. I watched the first too long ago to write substantively about it, but what primarily recommended itself to me was that I thought it was really funny and as compared to other shows and movies it didn't step too hard on the "Suburbia isn't perfect! It's actually teeming with damaged people living odd little lives with serious secrets!" pedal. That was and remains a weakness of the show - younger Botwin son Shane's lower school graduation speech is endearing but also a giant hammer used to drive home the failure of suburbia's adults to keep their children safe (i.e., he shouts "YOU HAVE FAILED! WE ARE NOT SAFE!") - but it's largely subsumed by the rest of what's going on. The difference between Seasons One and Two is that One was about how this suburban housewife/widow was also a pot dealer, and Two is about how Nancy Botwin is a pot dealer. I almost wonder if the show (and Parker's amazing performance) has created this characterization in spite of itself, and I'm almost disinclined to watch Season Three, the plot synopses of which are incredibly ridiculous (although the season concludes in an apocalyptic event which suggests that maybe the show won't retreat from examining the consequences of Nancy's behavior). (It's sort of like how the first season of 24 is, basically, "Jack Bauer tries to protect a US Presidential candidate from the men trying to kill him while also trying find his kidnapped wife and daughter," whereas now Season N of 24 is summarized as "Jack kills a guy with his teeth to escape from custody and help stop a terrorist who's trying to poison the water in Los Angeles but this turns out to be a diversionary strike when the real target is to release chemical weapons during a Dodgers game but as Jack races against the clock to unravel the scheme he realizes that it's inextricably tied to the former POTUS' brother-in-law's aunt, a shadow power figure who has unknown connections to Jack's dogsitter and has schemes of her own.")

[Since originally writing this post, I read some Television Without Pity recaps of the first few episodes of Season Three, which leave me still uncertain that I want to watch, but also gave me another angle. One of the recappers drops his own take on the changes between seasons and posits that in Season One, Nancy's business life (which will eventually get its own alias, Lacy LaPlante ("Why not just Mary Jane Dealer?"]) keeps eating chunks out of her personal home life and relationships. This sets up Season Two, where Nancy retreats into Lacy as a protective reaction against the pain of Nancy being slowly torn up. The end of Season Two moving into Season Three is about how the people in Nancy's life react to her withdrawal, by trying to sabotage Lacy's business world as a way to get Nancy back, but in doing so inadvertently put Nancy and themselves into greater danger. If Nancy doesn't meet her obligations she's a bad mother, but if Lacy falls down on the job she could get shot. I think this is a pretty spot-on take on the character's evolution, and probably indicates why I think so highly of Season Two as a particular moment in the arc - since I have a very negative attitude towards Nancy, and have since the beginning of the show, her retreat into the Lacy alias exposes most honestly the things I find distasteful about her and by my prejudices cut most deeply to what I think the core of the show is. Creator Jenji Kohan might disagree.]

"Selfish! Selfish!" Elizabeth Perkins' character (during a selfish moment of her own) screams at Nancy, and it's true. Actually, Nancy is surrounded by bad adults, horrible people incapable of keeping their children safe, but they're not monsters like she is. Perkins' Celia is a nightmare of a mother to her (awesome) pre-adolescent daughter, but she very honestly means well and has moments of self-recognition. Her daughter hates her, and she kind of hates her daughter, but she's trying to love her the only way she knows how, despite being completely inadequate for the job. Celia's daughter says that her mother is Voldemort, but she's just a selfish and self-hating drunk. Nancy's brother-in-law is also selfish and completely irresponsible, and the moments when he's the most capable adult available are kind of frightening, but he also honestly means well, and he also kind of knows what he is and is trying to change despite being ill-equipped for the task. The only character on the show who might be as irredeemable as Nancy is her older son Silas, who proves that he's more than a magnificent and selfish brat by using a safety pin to puncture his condom before having sex with his girlfriend in an attempt to get her pregnant and keep her from going to college without him. (It works [she gets pregnant] but fails [her parents make her get an abortion and shut him out of her life]. I don't want to condemn a teenager to the verdict of being irredeemable, but Silas is also just too stupid and angry to be scary. If he were the son of a Baltimore stevedore instead of a Californian pot dealer he'd be Ziggy Sobotka from The Wire, whose vibrating anger at the world for thrusting itself upon him leads him to ruin his family as well as himself, obnoxious and ineffectual to the last.)

Nancy, though...Nancy does not know what she is. Tony Soprano was also a psychopath, and he struggled (and failed) to know Why he was, but he never had any illusions about What he was. In Season Two of The Sopranos, after using a gambling debt as leverage to take over and ultimately ruin a friend's life, Tony sadly explains that he'd told his friend not to sit at the mob's poker game, but was ultimately unable to stop him. And when his friend was deeply, deeply in debt, Tony was powerless to do anything but destroy him - take all his money, his things, take over his business, use it as a front, run it into the ground - because that's what the mob does, and Tony is a mob boss. He knows his own nature, and it is to prey on the weak. Nancy Botwin doesn't prey on the weak, but she destroys, by letting other people do the destroying for her. By the end of Season Two she's brought her family closer and closer to danger - she HAS utterly failed to protect her sons, physically or emotionally - is in severe physical danger herself (along with her only true friend) and has a man's blood on her hands (though she never asked for him to be killed). She's a ball bearing willing herself through a Rube Goldberg machine of crime and violence and never stops being astonished at the amazing things going on around her, never stops to see that she's making them happen.

It all works because of Parker and her performance. Not everyone buys Parker as an actress - she's full of odd choices that can seem mannered and distracting to the unsympathetic viewer, but I buy them completely. Similarly, not everyone buys Parker as a beauty, but I'm pretty well smitten. And that's what makes it work: she's beautiful, but it's not enough for her to be beautiful. Charlize Theron couldn't sell this role, and I think she's a very good actress. Parker is disarming, her appearance and her acting working in sync; she's physically insusbtantial, almost fragile, but surprisingly tough and fierce. There's an endearing loopiness to the set of her mouth or the way she stands or holds her arms in a scene, and it draws you in, undoes your defenses, and in the moment you think nothing of going on a ride with this weird vulnerable edgy wonderful rollercoaster of a woman. (Parker's not just a loopy actress, though; in addition to nailing moments of extreme emotional intensity - her fear and attempted bravado and inability to truly process what's happening when her life is in danger is captivating - she can handle breathtaking subleties. In Season One she watched a tape of herself and her late husband making love, and it's heartbreaking in its small truth; in Season Two a scene opens with her at her computer, when suddenly she closes her eyes and breathes her husband's name before turning around as in a dream to find her young son has slathered himself in some of dad's old cologne, hidden away in a cabinet.)

And they go: the circle of men around her helping her get this pot business off the ground, not least of whom is Conrad, who intellectualy knows better and has been told to know better, but lets himself fall into the trap anyway; her sons, fighting at first to hold onto their place in her life but eventually acting out not for her attention but for her protection (young Shane becomes an anti-anti-drug demagogue at school while high schooler Silas steals video cameras that might compromise his mother's trade); Peter Scottson, who should be far too smart to let himself get dragged into Nancy's little cyclone of havoc, but does and turns villain before losing everything as a result. A weakness of the season is that Peter's journey into moral grayness takes a sudden left turn into outright villainy (for chrissakes, he calls Conrad a "nigger," in a completely jarring moment for the character) because the audience can't feel too bad about his demise. Boo to that: he was a DEA agent who knowingly dated (and briefly aided) a drug dealer, and if he didn't deserve what came to him he wasn't an angel to begin with. (Silas, in a moment of rare perception, freaking out after learning that his mom is dating law enforcement, is laudably unappeased when his mom tells him that he knows she's a dealer: "Oh, so he's a crooked cop?!") And the real point here is that Nancy created (but doesn't see that she created) a situation where Peter's end was necessary to her own survival as well as the survival of the people she cares about. People beat each other up, make arrests, steal, and commit arson all for her, and she always says never to do it again while expressing her undying gratitude. Peter's fate is the only crime not comitted explicitly for Nancy's sake (her mentor Heylia orchestrates it to save her own skin, backed into a corner), but her blithe tunnelvision created the opportunity and the necessity. If Peter didn't know Nancy was trouble at the gun range, he should have known when she tricked him and Conrad into meeting, as she insists that things will go better if they get to know each other. They don't, of course, and they never could: she spurs Peter's (unfounded) sexual jealousy and Conrad's (founded) fear of persecution and doesn't think twice about the danger she's put either man in despite ostensibly caring deeply for them both. Her choices are motivated only by what is convenient to her in the moment and if there are boundaries to her moral trespasses her lack of self-knowledge shields her from them, ensuring that other people will have to cross the lines for her.

She repeatedly says that she's trying to protect her sons, but Silas and her brother-in-law tell both her that she's full of shit and putting them in ever greater danger. She used to justify her dealing as a necessity; after her husband's death she had no other way to support the family, but this is also bullshit. She's a smart woman who almost certainly went to college and could get a job SOMEwhere doing SOMEthing. What she couldn't do is support her family to the degree of luxury she wanted to maintain, and for all its dangers dealing weed was and is the "easy" option. She chooses it out of convenience and doesn't get out when she has the chance because she likes it. By the end of the second season her justifications have, tellingly changed - now she talks up how pot is a victimless drug (but she doesn't want her sons doing it) and she's just providing a service that someone else would fulfill. Nancy resermbles Carmela Soprano almost more than she does Tony, willfully enabling her own criminal lifestyle because she likes the perks and she gets off on the rush. She likes being a criminal and she protects herself (and only herself) from the cost of her behavior, letting everyone else take the hit.

If Nancy Botwin were the sort of person who didn't think to ask why the patrons at a gun range wouldn't just kill each other, Season Two of Weeds would have been much less interesting.

More Influences

I knew there was a pianist I forgot to mention in my weird little tour through one chain of influences in an attempt to figure out how much or little influence can show in one's mature style.

Brad Mehldau has mentioned in an interview that during his early days gigging in New York he moved in two different circles; in one he was known for playing in a Wynton Kelly bag, and in the other he was more McCoy Tyner-ish, but by the time he'd started his recording career the two streams had fused along with his other influences. Which is funny because (surprise!) the "other influences" are much more prominent in his playing today than either of the bags he used to play in. The Wynton Kelly thing hangs around as it does with many many jazz pianists, demonstrating one successful approach for integrating a blues feeling into a more modern context, but the Tyner has been, to me, undetectable. It's Mehldau's teacher, Fred Hersch, along with their common influences in Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett (more Jarrett for Mehldau, I think, and in one set of liner notes he memorably sounds off on critics who compared his playing to Evans'), that stands out, along with the classical influence he shares with Hersch. It's the classically-derived texture of his playing (yes, Mehldau is a pretty orchestral player) that sets Mehldau most apart from other pianists. Not that appropriating tropes from the European art tradition is anything new for jazz pianists: Bach is a perennial favorite because of the improvisatory nature behind the Baroque style, not to mention lines that clearly outline chord changes while staying melodic - a bebopper's delight - and the Debussy/Ravel influence was crucial in expanding jazz harmony from Gershwin to Ellington to Evans to Hancock. Mehldau is more squarely in the central European romantic tradition; he draws some harmonic inspiration and the texture of his voicings as much if not more from Schumann and Brahms than he does from Wynton Kelly or Bill Evans. Jarrett is a precursor in referencing this repertoire, but Mehldau's appropriation is more fully considered and more persistent. The musical ideas themselves were obviously out there in the ether (and the conservatory), Mehldau didn't just pluck them from the air like the greatest originalists, but he seems to have extrapolated far beyond the obvious precedents into some serious innovation. His most obvious stylistic influence is basically himself. Where Tyner went, other than sublimated into a penchant for rhapsodism shared with Jarrett and Schumann (less so Brahms, who I find more emotionally restrained), I don't know.

(This is neither better nor worse than anything else. At my favorite moments Mehldau is, in my opinion, more sui generis in conception than Jason Moran, but I still find Moran the more interesting pianist, and more consistently so.)

If there's an extramusical lesson to be drawn from these musings it's that the human desire to organize and categorize as a route to understanding is again flawed in the face of reality. I don't have much interest in categorizing people's sexuality, but I am compelled to categorize the evolutionary trees of musical style, and it's a flawed, failed project because a true representation would be too tangled to read in context. You could hope to make a chart for one player: This is Keith Jarrett, This is Randy Weston, but putting them all together makes too much a muddle. Make a tree for Brad Mehldau, compiling all the auditory evidence along with his own testimony, and you'd need to put Tyner somewhere in there, sticking out like a sore thumb, like a Neanderthal skull in the middle of a Cro Magnon burial ground (no offense intended to Mr. Tyner, of course), an element whose presence shouldn't be denied but can't be easily explained or contextualized. Like life.











Oooooooooooh, did that get serious and portentous enough there at the end?

Influences, Veiled and Declared

I'd say that I find the members of The Bad Plus more interesting than I do The Bad Plus itself. Well, I don't really have any opinion about the bassist, but their gorgeous cover of Aphex Twin's "Flim" aside (and, really, as long as Dave King can cop the drum 'n' bass thing on his kit, it'd be hard to fuck it up) I don't really care for what I've heard of their originals or their infamous covers. Yet Dave King is a really cool drummer and I think Ethan Iverson is a very interesting pianist as well as being a very interesting and thoughtful writer, as a perusal of his/their blog would indicate.

Recently he had a post about his upcoming gig with the Charlie Haden/Paul Motian rhythm section which he uses as a springboard to briefly wax enthusiastic (not for the first time) about Geri Allen, who everyone seems to agree was a Bright Young Thing on the jazz scene in the 80s and considered by many greats to be the Next Generation, but she kind of retreated as she got older; she still records, but neither in profile nor in her music is she quite as out there as she was back when. Iverson talks about how he would normally be more tempted than usual to get all Keith Jarrett with the Haden/Motian rhythm section, pointing out the influence Jarrett's recordings with those two had on him (and unsaid but perhaps more to the point is that Jarrett's major influence, Paul Bley, was once referred to by Iverson as "my true forebear"), but then says that Allen's recordings with that pair remind him of how flexible they are and how he needn't be tied to a particular conception when playing with them.

In the course of this Iverson draws what he admits is a simplistic evolutionary tree which shows Jarrett coming from Bill Evans and Paul Bley while Allen comes out of Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Which is, yes, relatively true, and I think he's right to say that Monk and Nichols (as pianists, at least) have pretty much no purchase in the musical world of Keith Jarrett. It's not necessarily true of the other direction, though, which is what set me thinking; I'm not nearly as familiar with Geri Allen's output as I should be, but while her older playing was definitely rocking some percussive angular vibrations, her more recent playing at least has also displayed an affinity for a kind of Herbie Hancock approach. Actually, several locations online cite (without direct attribution) her primary influences as Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and Keith Jarrett! Iverson himself, in an interview with Jason Moran, notes that these days she's playing a lot of Herbie Hancock. And one of the several places Herbie comes from is definitely Bill Evans, who was after all one of the probably two most directly influential jazz pianists of all time (along with Bud Powell). For the record, I'd say that after them in the modern era it's McCoy Tyner much more so than Herbie for a direct influence; more cats sound like they're copping McCoy, but on an inspirational and conceptual level Herbie's influence has been at least just as broad. (This is sort of like how I feel Clapton's more directly influential than Hendrix because there were more people running around playing Clapton licks, but Hendrix's more abstract essence was equally if not more inspirational to people who applied his lessons to many different contexts and vocabularies.)

The aforementioned Jason Moran frequently cites the late great Andrew Hill as one of his primary influences, perhaps the influence, while also pimping for Monk, Nichols, his teacher (the late great) Jaki Byard, and others from off the beaten path of jazz piano influence, but at least one person out there on the internet (my memory fails me and I don't feel like trawling through Google search results) thinks that Moran sounds more like - wait for it - Herbie Hancock than Andrew Hill, and I don't think I've ever seen Moran speak one way or another about Hancock's influence.

What gives?

First of all, I think the Hancock vs. Hill comparison was probably in reference to Moran's debut album, Soundtrack to Human Motion, where I hear it as well, although at the time I heard that album I was sadly ignorant of Andrew Hill. I think it has to do with Hancock's touch; both Moran and Hancock are of course great pianists (one is, laying out my cards, my favorite current player and the other is my favorite player in the history of jazz piano) and capable of varying the colors they get out of the piano, but Moran's debut is more consistently soft-focus than the bulk of his later material, and it's that kind of abstract haze which calls Herbie to mind.

According to Hancock, by the way, one of his primary pianistic influences is Oscar Peterson! Who sounds nothing like him!

What gives?

The most cogent explanation I've ever seen Hancock give in the first person about his musical influences is this: "by the time I actually heard The Hi-Lo's, I started picking that stuff out; my ear was happening. I could hear stuff and that's when I really learned some much farther-out voicings -like the harmonies I used on 'Speak Like A Child' -just being able to do that. I really got that from Clare Fischer's arrangements for the Hi-Lo's. Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept... He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that's where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were." He's talking here specifically about his harmonic language, which is the most unique and evolutionary aspect of Hancock's playing, and it absolutely owes a lot to both Bill and Gil Evans, as well as Ravel (I think I've also seen reference to him name-checking Messiaen and jazz theorist George Russell). The Hi-Los I've never personally heard, but this video of Clare Fischer certainly points at what Hancock could have learned from the man - also check out the shorts + Uggs combination!



McCoy Tyner is another likely influence, though I've never seen Hancock mention him (doesn't mean it hasn't happened), and in Hancock's bluesier moments, particularly on standards, there's something I associate with Wynton Kelly: maybe this is what he learned from Oscar Peterson?

Well: the other main figure in Hancock's pianistic evolution - at least out of the ones I can recall reading him talk about - is the obscure (and again late, and from what I'm hearing I'm going to say great) Chris Anderson, with whom Hancock apparently studied, or maybe just wanted to study with, but at any rate who knocked Herbie's socks off after he was already pretty far along in his apprenticeship. I never heard any Chris Anderson before tonight (thanks, eMusic!) but again I can hear that this is a man from whom Hancock would've drawn both inspiration and influence. Anderson's approach to the piano, physically, is maybe a little more muscular than I would associate with Herbie, but in his harmonies and his way around the keyboard I can hear the connection. His way around the keyboard. Wait!

Critics often speak of certain pianists who play with an "orchestral" approach to the piano. Sometimes this is meant (I have in mind Dick Hyman speaking of Jelly Roll Morton) to indicate that the pianist is imitating other instruments or (like Morton) the totality of jazz band. More generically the "orchestral" approach is indicated as an alternative to the "right hand plays single-note solos while the left hand plays block chords" paradigm of post-swing pianists. Hancock, like Jarrett and Bley, is unusual among "modern" (by which we mean born between 1930 and 1950) jazz pianists in having something of this "orchestral" approach. I don't recall what the commonly understood meaning of a "pianistic" approach to the piano would mean, but I associate it with the "orchestral" - essentially for me the conceptual faultline is between adapting the piano to the physical and mental reality of having two hands that function semi-independently and giving each hand a particular task (not-orchestral, what most have done from bebop on forward), or approaching the piano at face value, forgetting as much as possible the prejudices necessarily imposed by the design of the human system, and just viewing it as 88 keys meant to be played by whatever fingers we choose to bring to bear. Bud Powell, and most jazz piano, and lots of classical music, and most folk-based piano, is strongly in the "two hands, separate tasks" camp, while lots of classical music, and Art Tatum, and a few others, are more in the "orchestral" camp. By ignoring the traditional division of labor the hands become, paradoxically, more independent and range over the keyboard orchestrating (if you will) the music. All this stuff is on a sliding scale; neither Hancock nor I think Bley are nearly as "orchestral" as Tatum or Jarrett in his more ecstatic moments, but they're also further out in that realm than Bud Powell or Thelonious Monk.

Art Tatum? A primary influence (along with Nat Cole) on...Oscar Peterson! Well, actually, Peterson himself tended to deflect the Tatum influence in the direct sense; Peterson really does sound like a swing pianist - Cole, or Teddy Wilson - who learned some bop concepts and took some speed. Tatum was a powerful force in the young Peterson's life - he nearly gave up the piano after hearing the man's records - but he was a more inspirational (Hendrixian) influence than a direct "I learned his licks" (Claptonian) one. With Tatum it was the overpowering virtuosity and a lesser manifestation of that seem ambidextrous freedom, either hand capable of skittering across the keys without being tied to predefined roles.

This doesn't need to be detective work: that Hancock found Oscar Peterson very inspiring and influential at one point in time doesn't mean that Peterson's DNA needs to be clearly written in Hancock's playing, but that in itself is interesting. What we pick up when we need it and throw away when it's time to move on, it leaves a mark on us even if the mark isn't apparent to even moderately focused scrutiny. I imagine that a great part of Hancock's attraction to Peterson as well as Chris Anderson is the freedom with which they navigated the keyboard as compared to a Bud Powell, who was perfectly capable of playing all over the piano with both hands but generally chose not to, and this inspiration stayed with him long after other traces of Peterson's playing would have left the building and been replaced by the aforementioned harmonic pioneers. Herbie is, after all, a pretty out-there pianist in his note choice, more than he often gets credit for. Sure, people pick up on the abstraction, but there are some spiky voicings thrown in there with the Bill Evans-derived chords. The spikiness is deflated, though, by his touch, that light, feathery, I-performed-a-Mozart-concerto-as-an-11-year-old touch. Not that Hancock can't be percussive when he wants, but he doesn't seem interested in making the piano roar like a McCoy Tyner. If he laid into the keys harder much of his playing would probably sound a little more like Bartok than Ravel. I don't know where Herbie got his touch (intuition? Nat Cole? Maybe Peterson again - for all his hardswinging bluesiness I don't think of Oscar as a pounder so much as a tickler) but it's one of the most powerfully identifiable aspects of his playing and yet a much more difficult thing to quantify and analyze than, say, tracing the roots of his harmonic language.

Hancock, as I said above, is my favorite pianist, but I don't know how much I would really want to sound like him. (I've always remembered a quote from Billy Corgan, where he effectively said that he doesn't always like all the music Smashing Pumpkins made, but it was always an honest representation of who they are. I took and take this to mean that he sometimes wished he didn't write very gushy pop ditties or very derivative Sabbath riff-rockers, but he wasn't going to pretend that those impulses weren't a part of who he was.) Actually, I'd kind of want to sound, if I were grafting personalities together, like Herbie's note choices as filtered through Monk's hands. Hancock's chords with Monk's touch? As I imagine it in my brain, that actually sounds a little like...

Andrew Hill. (?!?)

I Read A Book On Body Language: Bones, Seasons One and Two

Bones is not a great show. It's engaging, sometimes clever, pretty uniformly well acted, usually pretty well written, and has a somewhat kookier premise than the average modern criminal procedural. It's also, to go with the kookier premise, a kookier show, which is the sort of things producers say about their projects all the time: "Well, I think what sets us apart from all the other procedurals on TV right now...is our sense of humor, and the focus on the characters." In the case of Bones that's actually true. (The character thing is also true, or at least it used to be, of Without a Trace, hands down my favorite of the CBS procedurals back when I was watching it. It's not funny, but the writing and the performances were usually top notch and Bones doesn't have anything to match Anthony LaPaglia's weekly acting clinic.) The show has goofy Christmas episodes and two of the characters do silly experiments to prove hypotheses (sending a frozen pig through a wood chipper, or blowing up a wall, or letting sea monkeys loose on a chunk of SPAM), and one of the characters has, for no particular reason, Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top as a father.

I have a weird fascination with TV shows that don't quite make it or cut it, which is why I slogged through all three seasons of Millennium: not affection for Lance Henrikson's skeletal mug, but because it was interesting to me how each season was essentially a new TV show with the same characters and it just never found its footing no matter how many times they tried to revamp it. (Well, it also had to do with my personal theories about Chris Carter's creative frustration, but.) What kept me going with Bones through the first few discs of Season One was David Boreanaz, which in itself was enough to make me take notice. Boreanaz' growth as an actor in the ten years or so since he showed up in the pilot episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is pretty astounding. Simply put, he wasn't very good; by the time he was headlining Angel he'd grown into the character and kept improving as the series went on. Now, playing a completely different character - and one that I suspect is probably more like Boreanaz himself - he's engaging, funny, subtle when he needs to be but always good for some broad mugging, and downright interesting to watch. Whoever Boreanaz's acting coach is should give him- or herself a pat on the back. (As should, I often point out, Chuck Norris'. Back in crap like The Octagon Norris is unwatchable, basically a glitchily animated wood carving, and you shouldn't underestimate the work and progress involved in going from being THAT BAD to the sturdy mediocrity of his performance in Walker, Texas Ranger.)

So while the show was frustrating me I kept watching because Boreanaz kept making me giggle, and the rest of the show kind of grew up around him, although the elemental problems I first had with it are still hanging around. (I haven't seen any of Season Three, and won't until DVD. Incidentally, the first half-season or so has some horrifically bad ADR, but either they got better at it or started being happier with the shooting scripts.) The main issue is that (and this is ultimately why I thought I'd have something to say in this post) I don't think the writers on the show are nearly as smart as the characters. I'm sure the writers on Bones are by and large intelligent people, but with the exception of Booth, who's a clever but fairly average guy, they're dealing with characters who are supposed to be brilliant, and the show's portrayal of brilliance, particularly scientific brilliance, is frustrating to the point of being moronic. Not that I'm a scientific genius, so it's possible that I'm wrong here, but being a forensic anthropologist doesn't actually imply that you have Asperger's. Originally all three of the brilliant scientist characters (Temperance "Bones" Brennan herself, Zack Addy, and Jack Hodgins) were written like hyperintelligent assholes who didn't comprehend the lives of us mere mortals who didn't reduce everything to testable hypotheses. Eventually I think the writers figured out this was a problem and the character of Jack, who was the most assholish of the troika, was changed significantly to the point where it's not a mystery how he can successfully interact with other human beings. Both Bones and Zack, her protege, are just too out of touch for this world, and the show's early and kneejerk deployment of its abortive catchphrase - Bones saying "I don't know what that means" when somebody drops a cultural reference - was a consistent loser that, thankfully, has been largely abandoned. For one thing there was no logic to what Bones did and didn't know: she doesn't know who Hannibal Lecter is, but she's also supposed to be a highly successful author of ooky crime and mystery thrillers, and we're supposed to believe that her publishers, at the least, have never mentioned the work of Thomas Harris? In another episode the character Angela says, while lost in the desert, "We're about 100 miles from where Jesus lost his sandals," and Bones is predictably clueless. Well, I'd never heard that one before either, Dr. Brennan, but unlike really smart scientists I've actually encountered a fucking metaphor in the past, can recognize one when I hear it, and have the logical and intuitive and contextual skills to work out roughly what the metaphor is supposed to indicate. Jesus. Incidentally, Emily "my sister has a well-received new album out but I'm on a successful TV show!" Deschanel has commented on discussing the Asperger's-y nature of her character with the show's creator, and for one character it's a valid if inconsistently written choice, but having Zack Addy be essentially the same way, except he's seen lots of science fiction movies, runs back into the weird stereotyping which for all the world looks like some people sat around a table and tried to imagine what it would be like to be really, really smart. I suppose this is a recurring problem with any fictional world - the writer can only travel so far outside his own experience and capabilities to create a character, and the presentation of people who are exceptional in ways the writer is not can often ring false. I'm not as smart as Dr. Brennan, but I'm smart enough to know that people as smart as she is (and it's not like she graduated from MIT at seventeen or anything) aren't necessarily socially maladjusted headcases who struggle with any communication that isn't hyperliteral.

But but but: some of the episode premises are really clever, and Stephen Fry made a multi-episode guest appearance as a psychiatrist that was, for me, one of the series' high points, and the chemistry between Boreanaz and Deschanel has evolved into something that does approximate, in terms of onscreen spark, the Mulder/Scully dynamic the show self-consciously was shooting for (and namechecked, to Brennan's predictable cluelessness, in the pilot episode). And also there's Ryan O'Neal as Brennan's father, in a story arc that I understand may or may not have resolved in Season Three but provided some of the show's best and most engaging acting as well as ultimately my favorite single scene thus far. Should it be telling that my favorite scene doesn't involve any of the regular actors, or any dialogue? Probably, but I haven't yet seen another network TV show aestheticize horrific violence in a way so memorably and captivatingly creepy and compelling. Fun fact: the episode this came from was directed by David Duchovny.

Why I Don't Like People

OK. In blog terms this is ancient. It's over a week old. But it captured a good chunk of my thought for three or four days and I was thinking about blogging it at some point during the past week, so I'm going to try and set down my meager thoughts now.

This story (which was linked here) pretty much broke my heart for a few days, and as I explained to my father over dinner, kind of captures one of the big reasons I kind of don't like people: I kept turning out variations on the sentiment that "the narrowness of human imagination is beggared by the breadth of human experience." And for people living outside that collective imagination the rest of us make life hell.

I don't have a great deal to say about the meat of the story itself; I feel it largely speaks for itself, and I don't have any insights to offer on the experience of identifying as transgender. I can't pretend (and, frankly, I don't think either therapist should either) to have a certainty about what attitude one should take towards children with the apparent dispositions that these two kids display, and while I'm much more sympathetic to Ehrensaft's approach than Zucker's, I also doubt that any one way would work for every child (in current society, at least, which is the larger concept of this post). The stress and pain Zucker's methods are clearly causing Bradley had me tearing up when I read them, but on the other hand I'm fearful for the transition Jona may experience on reaching puberty, at which point it's most likely (barring an intentional hormonal intervention that I'm very uncomfortable with condoning) that predictable physical changes will make it much more difficult to smoothly integrate as a girl.

Assuming that Jona still wants to be Jona at that point, which wraps back around to where I was starting from. There's a pretty common story out there about what it means for a sexually mature adult to ID as transgender, and many people are or are becoming aware that there isn't anything like a 1-to-1 correlation between being TG and having homosexual desires. However, it's also my (imperfect) understanding that this story, which usually involves some heavy revelations like "I just never felt at home in my own body" may not even represent a majority of the TG experience-spectrum. Whatever the case for each individual, for adults there's a mature understanding of how we perceive the natural order of sexuality and what is and isn't the common experience for the overwhelming percentage of people who fall within the norms. (Norms and normal being deployed in a pseudo-scientific context here and not in any way an evaluatory one; it's not normal to be seven feet tall or know calculus in grade school.) An adult has the capacity to weigh her/his emotions and come to clear realizations about how s/he feels about and towards her/his body and, particularly, primary and secondary sex characteristics. A child simply isn't, at least as far as I can conceive. Sure, kids know that boys have penises and girls have vaginas (or at least they know what they have - some overeager Freudian would surely have a field day with the story that when I learned c. age 2-3 that my mother didn't have a penis I told her, "Don't worry, mommy, Daddy and I will get you one") but until they're old enough to understand what those organs are primarily for (or even what they're like in maturity) that's not driving their impulses to "TG" behavior. Perhaps this is a failing of my particular imagination to encompass the whole of human experience, but I don't think six year old biological males feel alienated from their penises, at least not in the way an adult could be. Bradley and Jona[h] certainly don't seem to have expressed themselves in that fashion; they've been categorized as [potentially] TG on the bases of nonsexual behavioral impulses, and that categorization may hold accurate for the rest of their lives or it may not.

But it's being driven by things like preferred clothing and toys and there appears to be a lack of reflection on the causal chain involved. Perhaps these are kids who simply have disproportionate and improbable tastes for things that are culturally marked as feminine, and perhaps they're kids who at a very early age felt an attraction to the feminine in some elemental way and thereby intuited an attraction to what we currently code as such - which social coding has I believe been demonstrated to be extremely pervasive and more than powerful enough to overcome parental example and influence. And it's all bullshit, of course. One hundred years ago the color pink, bane of Bradley's self-control in his quest to bend over backwards for adult approval, was the appropriate color, a strong color, for baby boys, and was not considered a "girl's" color. Two hundred and fifty years ago the Founding Fathers wore wigs, stockings, and chunky high heels. Scotsmen traditionally wear special skirts. The cultural markers of what is masculine and what is feminine are subject to change and not nearly as essential as they appear to us at any given point in time. Armpit shaving is a primarily American invention that's about a hundred years old, and in that time - an instant in biological evolution but an eternity in cultural evolution - it's become a de rigueur practice for women, and those who choose to ignore it are mocked pretty incessantly. (And it's not like my intellectual awareness of all this somehow frees me from the shackles of our momentary convictions; I dated a girl who if memory serves didn't shave her armpits [I think she shaved her legs but I could be wrong - this was now about ten years ago] and didn't think much of it at the time but I'd be lying if I said I didn't strongly prefer "smooth feminine hairless" skin to, you know, the actual natural condition.) Maybe loving Barbie and wanting a dress* is a clue that these kids are going to grow up and live their lives as women, but the concern that's being driven by such ephemeral expressions is maddening. I really don't blame either set of parents; I think they come across as people who love their children but felt overmatched and turned to professional help and are sincerely doing what they've been led to believe is right for their child. I blame (naturally) the society that drives us to those concerns in the first place. Our natural human instinct to impose an externally designed order upon the universe of natural variation is ever and always a failure, but the failure of "man and woman" to capture the spectrum of genotypic and phenotypic expressions, let alone purely psychological persuasions, is much more upsetting than our inability to settle on a universally congenial definition of what is and isn't a "species".

And it's that ephemera that wound up really driving my disdain for Zucker in particular, who draws the idiotic but superficially wise analogy to the case of a black toddler who "wants to be white". Well, I presume Zucker imagines a child who, like Michael Jackson, is at unease with the brute physical fact of his skin color. I have only the NPR story to go on, but based on the information presented this isn't a boy who toddled into Zucker's office and said he hated his penis, he's a boy who wants to play with unicorns and roll around in pink chiffon. The analog is not to a kid who wants to change his skin color to be white, but his behavior to be white. This is inadvertantly and irrelevantly trodding into another, highly charged, ddeeply nuanced territory that I can't really do justice right now, but think of how elementally silly our concepts about "acting" white or black are - would Zucker really be concerned about a black kid who, despite the mockery of his peers, wanted to speak like, oh, Zucker? Who preferred, I dunno, badminton to basketball, or foie gras to fried chicken? I'm trading in gross stereotype for a reason here - to point up the apparent failures of Zucker's imagination to think outside the rigid strictures we've artifically imposed on our world, and how corrosive it is for the few (but still many) who fall outside those strictures.

I was reminded of the fatuous single-sex education** activist Dr. Leonard Sax, who wants to turn averages of gendered experience into prescriptions (and proscriptions) on how we ought to differently "educate" our boys and girls, by catering to the supposedly natural inclinations they feel so as to better engage them in the classroom. You know, boys will be encouraged to be boisterous and rough and tumble and special attention might be paid to tricking us into enjoying reading while girls will be allowed to sit primly and be called upon and write flowery stories that help them understand all that nasty abstract math. In other words, make school hell for someone like me. Other than having an aversion to scholastic teamwork and a level of confidence that's thought of, in grade school students, as being stereotypically masculine (but was actually driven by being, oh, smart, and, incidentally, confident) I conformed in most every respect to the average preferences and habits of the young female student - I was quiet and well behaved, didn't like disruptions, didn't like to get messy, loved reading and writing and found it congenial and attractive to express myself creatively and artistically vs. being focused on, what, monster trucks and baseball. This despite my being a well-adjusted, academically exceptional, well-liked, reasonably athletic kid who grew up into a somewhat maladjusted, intellectually strong, reasonably well-liked, pretty damn heterosexual man. The only more hellish academic experience I can imagine for myself than a Saxian boys' institution is the classic English boarding school, where academic seriousness could be balanced by retrograde gender notions, corporal punishment, and a social order that treated its younger members like Greek slaves, equally useful for shoe-polishing or pederasty.

* The description of young Jona weeping because the improvised T-shirt/belt outfit was, despite so much effort and modification, still not right, also had my eyes tearing up. The brief passage where the mother watches her child "mournfully finger" the outfit perfectly captures for me the kind of deep sadness (obviously magnified here) that a young child feels at the frustration of a beloved pursuit. We'd be better people as adults if we could maintain the kind of serious focus and wholehearted commitment with which children throw themselves into their fantasies and enthusiasms, but the price for that mindset is an emotional pain that I can't really access anymore, yet for which I feel weirdly nostalgic.
** Single-sex education isn't fatuous (though I'm generally opposed), just Dr. Sax's take.

Doc Rivers, I Will Sell You A Clue

It's a commonplace of people reflecting on the nature of territorial sports fandom (i.e., rooting continually for the same team, rather than FreeDarkoesque "liberated fandom") that the pain of losing is greater than the joy of winning. Additionally, the greater the expectations, the harder the comedown; if you never expected to make it to the title game, losing isn't as painful. Surely that's a lesson reinforced for fans of Boston sports in the wake of the Superbowl this year; of course I'm happy the Pats had a great season until their last game, and I wouldn't trade those first 18 games for a middling season of fulfilled but low expectations. But the loss still hurt the more for all the buildup that went into it.

The Celtics' season, though pretty damn impressive, wasn't on the level of the Pats' run at an undefeated year, but those 66 wins look pretty hollow. This has been a weird playoffs anyway, what with the widespread dominance of the home team in any given game, but the Celtics in particular seem so pathetic in their split-personality, winning handily at home and looking like a lottery team on the road. It's bizarre how discombobulated they become outside the Garden, and watching Kevin Garnett fulfill every low expectation I ever had of him as well as watching Pierce retreat into his worst impulses is pretty depressing. And Good Lord is Doc Rivers a bad coach. Really bad. Like, the people who think coaching doesn't really matter in basketball because all you need to do is fire up the players and manage the rotations and call timeouts have to recognize that he's a bad coach because he...can't seem to fire up the players in any effective way, and he can't manage the game and he CANNOT manage his rotation. I'm not watching another Celtics game until/unless they win one on the road; I'm just tired of it right now. I have an intellectual curiosity in the potential Spurs/Lakers matchup, but my basketball malaise has corrupted enthusiasm, and I wouldn't watch it; I would watch Hornets/Lakers, and (Celtics aside) I'd watch either the Hornets or the Lakers take on the Pistons.

Oh, fuck it: I'll watch a Spurs/Detroit finals too, because I'm always up to see Tim Duncan vs. Rasheed Wallace.