The Breakfast Club (So You Want To Play Carnegie Hall)

I actually have a cousin (of some sort, it’s not a close relationship and it’s a branch of the family we don’t have much communication with) who played in Carnegie Hall and as the dedicated East Coasters (practically everyone else lives in the mid or farther West) we received invitations to be part of the rooting section.

Well, this was interesting.  I don’t recall much about my first visit (there must have been, we didn’t skimp on the cultural stuff), so when we went to the city (there is only one) and met with the immediate relatives at their hotel room that was not just tiny but very, very expensive, it was a novelty.

Soon enough it was time to unpack the sardines and head to the big show where we spent a very informative interlude at the museum which was already quite high enough for me.  Oh, have I mentioned I suffer from severe acrophobia?  It’s not that I can’t, it’s that it is very disturbing and difficult.  Anyway, as the designated ‘country cousins’ we got the extra tickets which happened to be in the uttermost nosebleed section next to the rail.  And the chairs were canted forward so you could get a good view of the stage.

So I can fairly describe the overall sensation for me as being dangled off the precipice of a bottomless pit, except of course for that well lit stop at the end.

After courageously assessing the situation I informed my family I would be watching from the aisle and I went to the nosebleed lobby and told the usher of my decision to which she repiled, in a very sympathetic way mind you, “Yeah, we get a lot of that.  Do you need to sit down?  A paper bag?”  So I, at various points, got as close as I dared and stared at the ants of whom I would hardly have recognized my cousin with binoculars because, as I said, our families weren’t that close and I barely knew him.

After that we went out with my Aunt (again not a blood relative) for my first experience of Thai where I was not really able to tell what dishes contained Bell Peppers (I’m EpiPen allergic).  Thank goodness peanuts are ok.  Ah, I could go on and on, this Aunt told my Dad not to mention his brother’s death days before at her Marathon party because it would ruin the vibe.  Her daughter (not at all the same cousin) has been on The New York Times Best Seller list twice and I’m terribly jealous…

I have issues, but everyone is damaged in some way and what you strive for is high functioning.  So you want to play in Carnegie Hall?  Practice, practice, practice.

Which brings us to Études.

Études are an artifact of the late Romantic period which are deliberately designed to be difficult to perform to showcase the virtuosity of the performers so musicians use them to practice.  Since many of the great composers were also outstanding performers, they would write Études for warm up pieces before their concerts.  They were frequently written for piano which is the most complete instrument and the easiest to orchestrate and transpose for other instruments.

Among the more obscure composers whos works are still regularly used are Carl Czerny and Muzio Clementi while some of the better known ones are Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt and Claude Debussy,

The Debussy ones are particularly interesting and often performed together as a part of a concert program.  Liner notes–

Book One

• I. Pour les cinq doigts (after Czerny)
• II. Pour les tierces (2:52)
• III. Pour les quartes (6:28)
• IV. Pour les sixtes (12:06)
• V. Pour les octaves (16:23)
• VI. Pour les huit doigts (19:35)

Book Two

• VII. Pour les degrés chromatiques (21:08)
• VIII. Pour les agréments (23:15)
• IX. Pour les notes répétées (28:13)
• X. Pour les sonorites opposées (31:35)
• XI. Pour les arpèges composés 2 (36:57)
• XII. Pour les accords (41:48)

Early in 1915, disheartened by the menace of World War I and gravely ill with cancer, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) nevertheless managed to compose. The fruits of his labors, 12 Etudes (study pieces or exercises), would be his last important works for solo piano, and would represent a distillation of the composer’s musical legacy. It was appropriate for Debussy — the most original composer for the piano since Franz Liszt — to join the ranks of etude composers. Equally fitting was his dedication of his two volumes to Frederick Chopin, noting that the serious nature of the exercises was offset by a charm reminiscent of the earlier master.

The etudes are divided into two books, each different in conception. Book I is devoted to exploring the technical problems and musical possibilities inherent in different intervals (thirds, sixths, etc.), while Book II engages in the exploration of musical syntax and style. In all, the etudes are witty, challenging, and inspired. Though academic in nature — and perhaps less easily digested than other of Debussy’s works — they fall closely on the heels of his popular Préludes and Images, and reflect the same aesthetic concerns: complex harmonies, fragmented melodic lines, and colorful textures.

The first etude of Book I, “Pour les ‘cinq doigts’-d’apres Monsieur Czerny” (For Five Fingers-after Mr. Czerny), is inspired by the five-finger exercises of Carl Czerny. Debussy pantomimes the pedantic works by placing figurations in grotesque juxtaposition and introducing bizarre modulations. “Pour les Tierces” (For Thirds) presents an extraordinary variety of patterns in parallel thirds, excepting those already encountered in “Tièrces alternées” from the second book of Préludes. “Pour les Quartes” (For Fourths) exercises the pianists ability in parallel fourths. Almost needless to say, quartal harmony abounds, making this etude more tonally adventurous than many of the others. “Pour les Sixtes” (For Sixths) is a slow and meditative work with two fast interludes, and one forte interruption. “Pour les Octaves” (For Octaves) combines chromaticism, whole-tone harmonies and complex syncopation. Probably the most brilliant etude of both books, it is equally difficult to play. “Pour les huit doigts” (For Eight Fingers) is meant to be performed (the composer’s suggestion) without the use of the thumbs, due to the division of the figuration into four-note scale patterns. It finds humor in its rigid insistence on four-note groupings and sudden ending.

Book II begins with “Pour les degrés chromatiques” (For Chromatic Intervals), an essay in the use of the chromatic scale, both compositionally and technically. “Pour les agréments” (For Ornaments) is one of the most fiendishly difficult works in the repertoire. The entire fabric of the music is created by juxtaposing musical embellishments, arpeggiations, and miniature cadenza-like passages. “Pour les notes répétées” (For Repeated Notes) requires a performer able to execute repeated tones with great rapidity while still maintaining the piece’s humorous, scherzando atmosphere. One wry melodic fragment balances the otherwise relentlessly staccato texture. “Pour les sonorités opposées” (For Opposing Sonorities) emphasizes the kind of multiple-layered textures found earlier in the second set of Images and many of the préludes. “Pour les arpéges composés” (For Composed, or Written-out, Arpeggios), easily the best-known of all the etudes, redefines the arpeggio to include a variety of non-harmonic tones (such as the added second or the added ninth). “Pour les accords” (For Chords), is probably the nearest thing to a Romantic virtuoso piece that Debussy ever produced. Mammoth in conception and brutally difficult, this etude juxtaposes relentless perpetual motion with an almost uncomfortably still middle section. A truncated reprise precedes a driving conclusion that puts even the most skilled performer to a grueling test, both technically and interpretively.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Obligatories

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

–Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

This Day in History

News

Review: A ’60s View of Warhol’s Soup Cans, at MoMA

By KEN JOHNSON, The New York Times

MAY 7, 2015

In 1962, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, Andy Warhol had his first solo painting exhibition. It consisted of 32 canvases, each bearing the image of a Campbell’s soup can rendered as if by a grocery store sign painter. Except for red letters spelling the name of a different variety on each label – Tomato, Minestrone, etc. – they appear nearly identical.

Five of the paintings sold, including one to the actor Dennis Hopper. But then the gallery’s director, Irving Blum, decided he wanted the set for himself. So he bought back the sold pieces and purchased the rest from Warhol for $1,000. He held onto the series until 1996, when he turned it over to the Museum of Modern Art as a combination gift and sale reportedly valued at $15 million.

Since then, the museum has exhibited the paintings in grid formation, unlike in the Ferus exhibition, where they were displayed resting on narrow shelves all at the same level. Now for the first time at MoMA they are presented in a similarly horizontal array as the centerpiece of “Andy Warhol: ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’ and Other Works, 1953-1967,” an exhibition that revisits Warhol’s prescient early years with revealing economy.

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When Blum asked Warhol why exactly 32, the artist responded that Campbell made 32 varieties. He was a realist, and numbers had everything to do with the reality of a can of Campbell’s soup: How many were then produced and consumed, how much did a can cost, what was the profit margin? Campbell’s soup used to be a staple in middle-class American households. If you grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, you probably recall consuming gallons of it. Warhol said he had eaten Campbell’s soup every day for 20 years. It was a time when industrialized production and universal distribution of food seemed a miracle of modern progress. Warhol made art about things that were most real to the masses and to himself: food, money, the home, cheap entertainment and death.

Court Ruling on N.S.A.’s Data Collection Jolts Both Defenders and Reformers

By JONATHAN WEISMAN and JENNIFER STEINHAUER, The New York Times

MAY 8, 2015

A federal appeals court ruling that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records is illegal has scrambled bipartisan efforts to overhaul the program, emboldening those who say the efforts do not go far enough and undermining Senate Republican leaders who want to keep the current program in place.

Although both chambers of Congress are under Republican control, only the House has coalesced around a bipartisan effort to make substantial changes to the government’s bulk data collection, while the Senate has grown more divided in light of the court’s decision. Emblematic of that, the three declared Senate Republicans running for the White House have adopted different positions on a path forward.

“The sacrifice of our personal liberty for security is and will forever be a false choice,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, wrote for Time magazine, vowing to block even a short-term extension of the Patriot Act, under which phone data has been collected. “And I refuse to relinquish our constitutional rights to opportunistic and overreaching politicians.”

In the face of such disarray, federal law enforcement officials appear braced to lose some of their power, at least temporarily. “I don’t like losing any tool in our toolbox, but if we do, we press on,” said James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director. “I hope it doesn’t go away, but if it does, we press on.”

Unless You Are Spock, Irrelevant Things Matter in Economic Behavior

By RICHARD H. THALER, The New York Times

MAY 8, 2015

Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person. These things are supposedly irrelevant. But unfortunately for the theory, many supposedly irrelevant factors do matter.

Economists create this problem with their insistence on studying mythical creatures often known as Homo economicus. I prefer to call them “Econs”- highly intelligent beings that are capable of making the most complex of calculations but are totally lacking in emotions. Think of Mr. Spock in “Star Trek.” In a world of Econs, many things would in fact be irrelevant.

No Econ would buy a larger portion of whatever will be served for dinner on Tuesday because he happens to be hungry when shopping on Sunday. Your hunger on Sunday should be irrelevant in choosing the size of your meal for Tuesday. An Econ would not finish that huge meal on Tuesday, even though he is no longer hungry, just because he had paid for it. To an Econ, the price paid for an item in the past is not relevant in making the decision about how much of it to eat now.

An Econ would not expect a gift on the day of the year in which she happened to get married, or be born. What difference do these arbitrary dates make? In fact, Econs would be perplexed by the idea of gifts. An Econ would know that cash is the best possible gift; it allows the recipient to buy whatever is optimal. But unless you are married to an economist, I don’t advise giving cash on your next anniversary. Come to think of it, even if your spouse is an economist, this is not a great idea.

Of course, most economists know that the people with whom they interact do not resemble Econs. In fact, in private moments, economists are often happy to admit that most of the people they know are clueless about economic matters. But for decades, this realization did not affect the way most economists did their work. They had a justification: markets. To defenders of economics orthodoxy, markets are thought to have magic powers.

The End of California?

by Timothy Egan, The New York Times

MAY 1, 2015

In a normal year, no one in California looks twice at a neighbor’s lawn, that mane of bluegrass thriving in a sun-blasted desert. Or casts a scornful gaze at a fresh-planted almond grove, saplings that now stand accused of future water crimes. Or wonders why your car is conspicuously clean, or whether a fish deserves to live when a cherry tree will die.

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California, from this drought onward, will be a state transformed. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was human-caused, after the grasslands of the Great Plains were ripped up, and the land thrown to the wind. It never fully recovered. The California drought of today is mostly nature’s hand, diminishing an Eden created by man. The Golden State may recover, but it won’t be the same place.

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In the cities of a changed California, brown is the new green. A residential lawn anywhere south of, say, Sacramento, is already considered an indulgence. “If the only person walking on your lawn is the person mowing it,” said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, then maybe it should be taken out. The state wants people to convert lawns to drought-tolerant landscaping, or fake grass.

Artificial lakes filled with Sierra snowmelt will become baked-mud valleys, surrounded by ugly bathtub rings. Some rivers will dry completely – at least until a normal rain year. A few days ago, there was a bare trickle from the Napa, near the town of St. Helena, flowing through some of the most valuable vineyards on the planet. The state’s massive plumbing system, one of the biggest in the world, needs adequate snow in order to serve farmers in the Central Valley and techies in Silicon Valley. This year, California set a record low Sierra snowpack in April – 5 percent of normal – following the driest winter since records have been kept.

To Californians stunned by their bare mountains, there was no more absurd moment in public life recently than when James Inhofe, the Republican senator from Oklahoma who is chairman of the environment and public works committee, held up a snowball in February as evidence of America’s hydraulic bounty in the age of climate change.

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“Imagine if somebody ever said, ‘Let’s have a vote on how to use California’s water,’ ” said Daniel Beard, a former Bureau of Recreation commissioner and a critic of federal dam building. “That’s the last thing big agricultural interests would want.”

The food industry is ripe for disruption. The land that has been left fallow now in the Central Valley is still less than 5 percent of all the irrigation acreage in California. Another 5 percent would leave most of the industry standing, and leaner. Low-value, high-water crops would disappear, as is already happening.

Absent a vote of the people, the free market could end up as the decider. The big city water districts have more than enough money to buy farm water in a freewheeling exchange. Indeed, they’ve been making numerous purchases for years – though limited by complex water contracts and infrastructure that makes it difficult to pipe large amounts from one place to the other.

In addition, one fear of making water an open-market commodity is that rich and politically powerful communities would get all the clean water they needed, while poor public districts would be left out. A class system around breathable air has already developed in China. Is abundant water the next must-have possession of the 1 percent?

Agriculture will not give up its perch atop the power pyramid without a fight. Water that goes from the mountains to the sea is a waste, farmers say.

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Big new reservoir projects – a return of the concrete empire – are doubtful. Without a government subsidy, cost is the biggest obstacle. Farmers certainly aren’t going to pay the billions now footed by federal taxpayers. And then: Where is the “new” water going to come from? Underground, wells are probing ever deeper, sucking aquifers dry, the land sinking at a dramatic rate. Overhead, the sky is unreliable.

Officer in Freddie Gray case demanded man’s arrest as part of personal dispute

by Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland, The Guardian

Friday 8 May 2015 16.43 EDT

The most senior Baltimore police officer charged over the death of Freddie Gray used his position to order the arrest of a man as part of a personal dispute just two weeks before the fatal incident, prompting an internal inquiry by Baltimore police department.

During an erratic late-night episode in March, Brian Rice boasted he was a Baltimore police lieutenant and warned “heads will roll” if officers in a nearby city did not “go arrest” his ex-girlfriend’s husband, according to a police report obtained by the Guardian.

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Two weeks later, it was Rice who initiated the arrest of Gray after the 25-year-old “made eye contact” with the lieutenant in a west Baltimore street and ran away. Gray was chased and subjected to a fatal arrest that was declared unlawful by the city’s top prosecutor.

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According to a report filed on 29 March by Westminster police officer Christopher Obst, Rice arrived at the city’s police headquarters soon after 3.45am that day, demanding that police go to the home of Karyn McAleer, an ex-girlfriend and fellow Baltimore police officer with whom he has a young son, and arrest her husband, Andrew.

Rice claimed Andrew was violating a court-issued peace order to stay away from Karyn and her home. The Guardian understands that the order did not relate to any instances of violence.

Rice, who was placed under a temporary restraining order in 2013 after being accused in court filings of threatening to kill Andrew during a series of aggressive encounters, claimed he had spotted Andrew’s car in Karyn’s driveway after “driving by”.

Despite Obst assuring him that officers would go to the house to check on his young son’s welfare, Rice “was not satisfied”, the police report said, and instead repeatedly said Andrew McAleer must be arrested immediately.

“Heads will roll if something happens to her or the children, if you do not go arrest him,” Rice said, according to Obst. Rice added that he was a “lieutenant in the Baltimore police department” and McAleer “would be locked up instantly” if they followed his instructions, the police officer wrote.

Police who visited Karyn McAleer’s home found her mother and sister babysitting her children, who were sleeping. The women told police Andrew was not at the house and had not been for some time, and merely left his car parked at the property. But Rice refused to believe he was not there, according to Obst, insisting incorrectly “he must have ran out the back door”.

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Professor Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, branded the revelations “concerning” and “appalling”.

Walker said more serious action should have been taken against Rice in 2013.

“Threatening to kill somebody is a crime and he should have been referred for prosecution and immediately suspended and probably terminated,” Walker said.

Walker argued that the incident in March 2015 could also be viewed as a crime under federal law, which prohibits any law enforcement officials from deliberately depriving a citizen of their civil rights.

“This is all appalling,” said Walker. “It doesn’t really surprise me because I think there has just been a pattern going back years in Baltimore of simply not disciplining officers for misconduct. This is worse than I ever imagined.”

Sheldon Adelson faces new scrutiny as documents challenge his testimony

by Chris McGreal in Las Vegas and Matt Isaacs, The Guardian

Saturday 9 May 2015 08.00 EDT

Sheldon Adelson, the multibillionaire casino magnate and key Republican party donor, spent four combative days in a Las Vegas court this week defending his gambling empire from accusations of bribery and ties to organised crime.

By the time the hearing was over, Adelson had argued with the judge, contradicted the evidence of his own executives and frustrated his lawyers by revealing more information than he was required to in response to simple yes or no questions. But most importantly, far from laying the allegations against his Las Vegas Sands conglomerate to rest, the billionaire’s answers threw up yet more questions which he is likely to have to return to court to answer.

On the court docket, the case is merely a wrongful dismissal suit. The former CEO of Adelson’s highly profitable casinos in the Chinese enclave of Macau, Steven Jacobs, is suing because he claims to have been sacked for trying to break links to organised crime groups, the triads, and for attempting to halt alleged influence peddling with Chinese officials.

But the extent of what is at stake for Adelson was evident in the form of the Nevada gaming board official monitoring the case from the public gallery.

Adelson accused Jacobs of “squealing like a pig to the government” and of blackmail in taking his accusations to the US authorities. They include the allegation that Las Vegas Sands paid what amounted to bribes intended to influence the Macau authorities and the government in Beijing and that the casino did business with a notorious triad leader.

The information Jacobs provided to the authorities prompted continuing investigations by the US Justice Department and federal financial regulators. If these allegations are shown to be true, then Adelson’s gambling licences could be in jeopardy because associations with organised crime could prompt action by Nevada’s gambling authorities, always sensitive to Las Vegas’s history with the mafia. That in turn may threaten the huge sums of money Adelson feeds into the Republican party. He is estimated to have spent $150m to try to secure a Republican victory over Barack Obama in the last presidential election.

Oprah Winfrey: one of the world’s best neoliberal capitalist thinkers

by Nicole Aschoff, The Guardian

Saturday 9 May 2015 08.30 EDT

Oprah is one of a new group of elite storytellers who present practical solutions to society’s problems that can be found within the logic of existing profit-driven structures of production and consumption. They promote market-based solutions to the problems of corporate power, technology, gender divides, environmental degradation, alienation and inequality.

Oprah’s popularity stems in part from her message of empathy, support, and love in an increasingly stressful, alienating society. Three decades of companies restructuring their operations by eliminating jobs (through attrition, technology, and outsourcing) and dismantling both organized labor and the welfare state have left workers in an extremely precarious situation.

Today, new working-class jobs are primarily low-wage service jobs, and the perks that once went along with middle-of-the-road white-collar jobs have disappeared. Flexible, project-oriented, contingent work has become the norm, enabling companies to ratchet up their requirements for all workers except those at the very top. Meanwhile, the costs of education, housing, childcare, and health care have skyrocketed, making it yet more difficult for individuals and households to get by, never mind prosper.

In this climate of stress and uncertainty, Oprah tells us the stories of her life to help us understand our feelings, cope with difficulty and improve our lives. She presents her personal journey and metamorphosis from poor little girl in rural Mississippi to billionaire prophet as a model for overcoming adversity and finding “a sweet life”.

Oprah’s biographical tale has been managed, mulled over, and mauled in the public gaze for 30 years. She used her precocious intelligence and wit to channel the pain of abuse and poverty into building an empire. She was on television by the age of 19 and had her own show within a decade.

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A stream of self-help gurus have spent time on Oprah’s stage over the past decade and a half, all with the same message. You have choices in life. External conditions don’t determine your life. You do. It ‘s all inside you, in your head, in your wishes and desires. Thoughts are destiny, so thinking positive thoughts will enable positive things to happen.

When bad things happen to us, it’s because we’re drawing them toward us with unhealthy thinking and behaviors. “Don’t complain about what you don’t have. Use what you’ve got. To do less than your best is a sin. Every single one of us has the power for greatness because greatness is determined by service-to yourself and others.” If we listen to that quiet “whisper” and fine-tune our “internal, moral, emotional GPS”, we too can learn the secret of success.

Janice Peck, in her work as professor of journalism and communication studies, has studied Oprah for years. She argues that to understand the Oprah phenomenon we must return to the ideas swirling around in the Gilded Age. Peck sees strong parallels in the mind-cure movement of the Gilded Age and Oprah’s evolving enterprise in the New Gilded Age, the era of neoliberalism. She argues that Oprah’s enterprise reinforces the neoliberal focus on the self: Oprah’s “enterprise [is] an ensemble of ideological practices that help legitimize a world of growing inequality and shrinking possibilities by promoting and embodying a configuration of self compatible with that world.”

Nothing captures this ensemble of ideological practices better than O Magazine, whose aim is to “help women see every experience and challenge as an opportunity to grow and discover their best self. To convince women that the real goal is becoming more of who they really are. To embrace their life.” O Magazine implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, identifies a range of problems in neoliberal capitalism and suggests ways for readers to adapt themselves to mitigate or overcome these problems.

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Oprah recognizes the pervasiveness of anxiety and alienation in our society. But instead of examining the economic or political basis of these feelings, she advises us to turn our gaze inward and reconfigure ourselves to become more adaptable to the vagaries and stresses of the neoliberal moment.

Oprah is appealing precisely because her stories hide the role of political, economic, and social structures. In doing so, they make the American Dream seem attainable. If we just fix ourselves, we can achieve our goals. For some people, the American dream is attainable, but to understand the chances for everyone, we need to look dispassionately at the factors that shape success.

The current incarnation of the American Dream narrative holds that if you acquire enough cultural capital (skills and education) and social capital (connections, access to networks), you will be able to translate that capital into both economic capital (cash) and happiness. Cultural capital and social capital are seen as there for the taking (particularly with advances in internet technology), so the only additional necessary ingredients are pluck, passion, and persistence- all attributes that allegedly come from inside us.

The American dream is premised on the assumption that if you work hard, economic opportunity will present itself, and financial stability will follow, but the role of cultural and social capital in paving the road to wealth and fulfilment, or blocking it, may be just as important as economic capital. Some people are able to translate their skills, knowledge, and connections into economic opportunity and financial stability, and some are not-either because their skills, knowledge, and connections don’t seem to work as well, or they can’t acquire them in the first place because they’re too poor.

Today, the centrality of social and cultural capital is obscured (sometimes deliberately), as demonstrated in the implicit and explicit message of Oprah and her ideological colleagues. In their stories, and many others like them, cultural and social capital are easy to acquire. They tell us to get an education. Too poor? Take an online course. Go to Khan Academy. They tell us to meet people, build up our network. Don’t have any connected family members? Join LinkedIn.

It’s simple. Anyone can become anything. There’s no distinction between the quality and productivity of different people’s social and cultural capital. We’re all building our skills. We’re all networking.

This is a fiction. If all or most forms of social and cultural capital were equally valuable and accessible, we should see the effects of this in increased upward mobility and wealth created anew by new people in each generation rather than passed down and expanded from one generation to the next. The data do not demonstrate this upward mobility.

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The way Oprah tells us to get through it all and realize our dreams is always to adapt ourselves to the changing world, not to change the world we live in. We demand little or nothing from the system, from the collective apparatus of powerful people and institutions. We only make demands of ourselves.

We are the perfect, depoliticized, complacent neoliberal subjects.

And yet we’re not. The popularity of strategies for alleviating alienation rests on our deep, collective desire for meaning and creativity. Literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson would say that the Oprah stories, and others like them, are able to “manage our desires” only because they appeal to deep fantasies about how we want to live our lives. This, after all, is what the American dream narrative is about – not necessarily a description of life lived, but a vision of how life should be lived.

When the stories that manage our desires break their promises over and over, the stories themselves become fuel for change and open a space for new, radical stories. These new stories must feature collective demands that provide a critical perspective on the real limits to success in our society and foster a vision of life that does fulfill the desire for self-actualization.

The courts stood up to NSA mass surveillance. Now Congress must act

by Alexander Abdo and Jameel Jaffer, The Guardian

Saturday 9 May 2015 07.30 EDT

The idea is that the NSA needs to vacuum up everything it can – because, well, one never knows what information might one day become useful. You can’t find the needles unless you have a haystack, intelligence officials say. You can’t connect the dots unless you first collect the dots. ‘Collect it all’ is a mentality, a mindset.

But ‘collect it all’ is also a legal theory and the significance of Thursday’s extraordinary ruling from an appeals court in New York is that it rejects this theory – or at least one manifestation of it. The government relies on a provision of the Patriot Act to collect the call records of hundreds of millions of Americans – the vast majority of them, needless to say, not suspected of having done anything wrong. On its face, the Patriot Act provision permits the government to collect records that are “relevant” to authorized investigations, but the government argues that everything is relevant because anything might be – one day.

Thursday’s decision rejects this argument categorically. “The interpretation the government asks us to adopt defies any limiting principle”, the court writes. To adopt it, the court observes, would permit the government to appropriate any private collection of data into a government database for future review. This, the court writes: “would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans.”

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The decision focuses on the NSA’s call-records program, but its implications are broader. This is because the same defective legal theory that underlies the call-records program is at work in some of the NSA’s other mass-surveillance programs as well. The NSA once collected the internet metadata of millions of Americans, arguing that all of the data was relevant because some of it might be. The CIA is reported to be amassing records of international financial transactions on the same theory. And, until recently, the Drug Enforcement Administration operated its own massive call-records database.

Right after the appeals court’s decision, Senator Richard Burr, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, appeared to disclose that the NSA is also collecting Americans’ IP addresses in bulk, presumably in an effort to assemble a massive database documenting Americans’ activities online. As Marcy Wheeler, who first noticed the disclosure, has since pointed out, the disclosure has mysteriously disappeared from the congressional record. There’s some murkiness about precisely what Burr meant, but there’s no question that Burr’s IP-address dragnet would be an unremarkable extension of the government’s collect-it-all logic.

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If Congress can’t coalesce around more comprehensive reform, the best course would be to let Section 215 expire. The intelligence community hasn’t even attempted to make a serious case that this authority is actually necessary. And as the recent ruling reminds us, it’s an authority that’s been grossly abused already and that could readily be abused again.

‘They’re making stuff up’: Barack Obama bites back at Democrat trade deal critics

by Dan Roberts, The Guardian

Friday 8 May 2015 16.16 EDT

The tone was jocular, but the president’s words on Friday betrayed mounting frustration with opponents in his own party who could derail perhaps the biggest domestic policy goal of his last two years in office.

“They are making this stuff up,” said the president, in an uncharacteristically blunt swipe at the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has irritated the White House by claiming upcoming trade deals would let multinational companies unpick national regulations like bank reform.

Obama has been attacked before by liberals – on surveillance, drones, budget deals – but this time he needs them.

With some populist Republicans also reluctant to grant him the “fast-track” negotiating authority necessary to complete two big deals with Asia and Europe, the president cannot afford to lose many more votes on Capitol Hill.

…

This time it is different, he insists. Whereas past trade agreements may have put the interests of US corporations and consumers before American workers, this time it is about levelling the playing field.

“Past trade agreements, it’s true, didn’t always reflect our values or didn’t always do enough to protect American workers,” Obama said. “But that’s why we’re designing a different kind of trade deal.”

It’s the “highest-standard, most progressive trade deal in history”, he added.

Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

Fibonacci clock: can you tell the time on the world’s most stylish nerd timepiece?

by Alex Bellos, The Guardian

Saturday 9 May 2015 04.22 EDT

Don’t you find clock faces quite aggressive, their hands and numbers constantly reminding you of the passing of the time?

If so, this beautiful invention is for you.

The Fibonacci clock lets you know the time more subtly, by changing colours and requiring you do some adding up.

The Fibonacci sequence is the sequence beginning 1, 1 and where each number is the sum of the previous two. Its first five digits are:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5

Philippe Chrétien from Montreal, Canada, noticed that these numbers are all you need to express all the numbers from 1 to 12.

…

Which means that it is possible to use them to describe the twelve positions on a clock, and therefore tell the time in 5 minute intervals.

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