zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — with an itch to ride the rails ]
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For your evening entertainment..

Easst to West, that the Wabash Cannonball, North to South, the City of New Orleans, sung by Johnny Cash and Arlo Guthrie respectively.

[ by Charles Cameron — I’m not particularly a jazz buff — this is mostly about my mentor Trevor Huddleston, who was also Maasekela’s mentor ]
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Hugh Masekela, jazz trumpeter extraordinaire, is no longer with us. May he rest in peace.

I was happy to read the story of Masekela’s connection with the mentor we were both ignited by, Fr Trevor Huddleston CR, in this obit for Masekela in the Guardian:

Hugh was given his own instrument when he was 14. He was then a pupil at St Peter’s, a remarkable secondary school for black children that became a centre for opponents of apartheid before being closed by the authorities. The staff included Oliver Tambo, later leader of the ANC, and Trevor Huddleston, later Archbishop Huddleston, president of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. The young Masekela was always in trouble. “I was one of the worst delinquents”, he once told me, “always fighting with the teachers or going into town stealing.” He was sent to see Huddleston because “you’d be sent to him when everything else had failed”.

Masekela had wanted a trumpet, he said, after seeing the 1950 film Young Man With a Horn, and recalled that he told the priest: “If I can get a trumpet I won’t bother anyone one any more.” Huddleston managed to raise £15 (“a lot of money in those days”) to buy the instrument, found a black Salvation Army trumpeter to teach Masekela, “and then he sat outside the school making hideous noises”. Other pupils naturally wanted instruments as well, and the Huddleston Jazz Band was born. They wore black trousers and grey silk shirts, and played American rather than African music. Along with Masekela, the band featured the trombonist Jonas Gwangwa, who would also become a star.

Huddleston continued to help Masekela even after the priest had left the school and South Africa. In 1956, when he was in the US publicising his book Naught for Your Comfort, he told Masekela’s story to a journalist, who suggested that it might interest Louis Armstrong, the best known trumpeter of the day. Armstrong was fascinated and handed Huddleston one of his horns to give to Masekela. “I sent it straight to South Africa, and I have a wonderful picture of Hugh jumping for joy,” said Huddleston.

It is good to see Fr Trevor so honored.

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I talked about Fr Trevor, Masekela, the Huddleston Jazz Band, and Satchmo‘s trumpet in Between the warrior and the monk (ii): Fr Trevor Huddleston, and while the photos there may be of interest —
especially the one where Satchmo is presenting Fr Trevor with the trumpet for Masekela — the video of Maasekela’s first record, Ndenzeni Na with the Huddleston Jazz Band has expired.

Happily, there’s another copy on Youtube for us to hear:

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Maselela goes to meet old and beloved friends, Trevor Huddleston among them.

[ by Charles Cameron — jazzing on WotR plus Hesse’s GBG ]
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Towards the end of her fine War on the Rocks piece, Blue Hair in the Gray Zone, Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider, Assistant Professor at the U.S. Naval War College (and lucky they are to have her) wrote:

The U.S. military has devoted immense resources to technology, but the future forces will fail without humans designing, adapting, operating, and maintaining the technology.

That’s pretty much the thrust of her whole piece — towards the beginning she’s already said it:

With the pace of current technological change, future force architects should care just as much about the people that man the forces as they do the machines.

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I applaud Dr. Schneider’s article, obviously — but to my mind’s eye it sums to a tiny, concentrated, powerful relationship:

technology : humans

We have the technology, the relation says, we need the humans.

I’m with that, but as always when I see writings that sum to that relation, I think of my own, repeated, obsessive equivalent:

humans : ideas

That’s my obstinate Plus One.

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It began, I suppose, with Hermann Hesse, who described his Glass Bead Game in a poem as a game played in a garden:

In the title poem of his book, Hours in the Garden .. is the Game as he played it himself, while raking leaves in his garden and burning them. In this simpler form, the great Game consists in imagining the great minds and hearts of the past — “wise men and poets and scholars and artists” — meeting across the centuries and talking…

That’s the game as an interaction between humans. In his great, Nobel-winning novel The Glass Bead Game, however, he has abstracted the game, and it is now played with ideas, rather than people:

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

Hence for myself, once and always:

humans : ideas

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But that’s my background motif, the ostinato of my passacaglia, always running in the background of my mind, even when I’m reading War on the Rocks.

And then I’m reading Dr. Schneider, and in the overlap of concepts —

technology : humans meets humans : ideas

or more simply:

technology : humans : ideas

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That’s what I’m impelled to say: just as we need the people to give algorithms to meaning and extract meaning from them, so we need the algorithms, and their contexts on a range of scales from tactical issues to the great questions of war and peace, conflict and resolution, pacifist’s and warrior’s codes…

What say your heart and mind?

[ by Charles Cameron — is the Dictionary of Occupational Titles ready for Steve Bannon? ]
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Now that both the White House and Breitbart have ejected him, there’s a question as to what employment Steve Bannon will find next. Luckily for us he’s already provided a somewhwat gnomic answer a while back, in conversation with Charlie Rose — as this DoubleQuote illustrates:

Boom!

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For further details, listen to Mick Jagger, lower panel above — or read his lyrics:

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
‘Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy
Well what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band…

Watch out — Steve Bannon is going to sing! Robert Mueller will be all ears..

[ by Charles Cameron — gulf water temperatures 2° above average fuel winds, flooding in TX ]

This event is unprecedented & all impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced. Follow orders from officials to ensure safety. #Harvey pic.twitter.com/IjpWLey1h8

— NWS (@NWS) August 27, 2017

Furthermore,

Going to a Cabinet Meeting (tele-conference) at 11:00 A.M. on #Harvey. Even experts have said they've never seen one like this!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2017

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These frank admissions that we have gone beyond the known signal a qualitative shift in the situation.

You don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

It’s altogether a hard rain falling..