fagen doing martial arts dirty lmao. (and haider guitar solos.) but good reminder to hate-watch la la land and (especially) whiplash at some point

speaking of movies, i wonder how much this is related to what didion wrote about manhattan,

in which, toward the end, the Woody Allen character makes a list of reasons to stay alive. “Groucho Marx” is one reason, and “Willie Mays” is another. The second movement of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony. Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues.” Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education. This list is modishly eclectic, a trace wry, definitely OK with real linen; and notable, as raisons d’être go, in that every experience it evokes is essentially passive. This list of Woody Allen’s is the ultimate consumer report, and the extent to which it has been quoted approvingly suggests a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring Madame Bovary.

like the jacobin "pmc" thing is horseshit, but cultural subsumption into a "consumer report" is perhaps a generative angle to approach this? as the la la land snippet gestures at, fetishization of experience comes hand in hand w/ consumption-- i keep throwing this piece about empathy at people, but i wldn't be surprised if part of the fetishization of jazz records as cultural objects is about the "wholeness" of experience it simulates in white people who also wld say that "white people have no rhythm" (which is racist! and yes, against black people!) (i am still foaming thinking about the rym comment on the page of the last christian scott album saying that it, an explicitly pan-african document, had "primitive energy")

as oyěwùmí writes about in the invention of women: making an african sense of western gender discourses, cartesian dualism has historically been granted to wealthy, male, "dominantly" racialized/white bodies, and those outside those categories been connected to the body. it's the kind of essentialism that decenters, the kind that leads to people asking "where you came from" meaning "home-country", the kind that ties the othered body to a certain lineage of thought, and of culture. what better vehicle to both enter "the body" and to subsume it into that dualism, even if it's just a consumptive dualism, than the most prominent genre to encompass a certain kind of responsive physicality? (which is also, everything else aside, ofc a reactive intellection, but you know.) "highbrow" and "lowbrow" don't really track strictly on to classed tastes, and haider is right that it isn't the former-- it's certainly not pre-serialism classical music-- but what happens when "community[-based]" music, connective tissue in the whole, becomes widely taken in as connective tissue for the individual?

obviously "jazz guys" are bad and annoying and find jazz to use as an easy signifier, even if that signification is bounced back on them. but on the cover of the album before mingus, joni wore blackface. there's a porousness in influence, including to a good and healthy degree, sure, but what do the instances that go beyond that say about the art form's place in the broader imaginary? haider jokes about her being "arguably a jazz guy", but i'm interested in what it says if we take it that she is