Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #314. He is most recently the author of Pops.

segundo314

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Playing for handy water closets.

Author: Terry Teachout

Subjects Discussed: Managing professional duties, the exigencies of sifting through 650 reels of Louis Armstrong’s tapes, Armstrong’s encounters with the mob, Armstrong’s relationship with manager Joe Glaser, the aborted Duke Ellington collaborative album, Pierre “Frenchy” Tallerie’s rough tour management, Frenchy as company spy, the effect of Armstrong’s star status on his musicians, the disparity between the net worth of Armstrong’s estate and Glaser’s estate, Armstrong’s remarks on the Little Rock Nine, FBI files and FOIA requests, condemnations Armstrong received in later years, rivalry between Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, James Baldwin, Armstrong’s aversion to bebop, why Armstrong didn’t break from his popular style, whether or not an artist has a responsibility to push past a middlebrow reception, floundering artists, disbanding the All Stars and improving the musical dynamic with the All Stars’s second iteration, Armstrong’s unexpected late career collaboration with Dave Brubeck, Armstrong’s ability to sell records during the Great Administration, popular tunes and mainstream accessibility in the 1920s, the dangers of critical consensus, Armstrong’s in-performance improvisation within “Stardust,” Armstrong’s unwavering affinity for the Swiss Kriss herbal laxative, the 1953 conflict between Armstrong and Benny Goodman, the question of artistic ego, the entertainer’s instinct, Armstrong’s conflict with Earl Hines’s showboating, Duke Ellington’s insistence on top billing, Armstrong’s tour of England and racist critics, the mistaken notion of Europe as an Eden for jazz musicians, exploring reception histories, Armstrong’s lawsuit with OKeh Records, the difficulty of collating Armstrong’s correspondence, Armstrong as writer, and self-awareness.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

teachouttCorrespondent: In light of Armstrong’s remarks about the Little Rock Nine, and of course his infamous remarks about Eisenhower, did the guy have an FBI file? Were you able to…?

Teachout: He did. It was mostly innocuous.

Correspondent: Oh, okay.

Teachout: There just isn’t anything of interest in it. I know this because I’ve seen it, but also because I FOIAed Joe Glaser. He doesn’t have a file.

Correspondent: None?

Teachout: None.

Correspondent: Despite his mob connections?

Teachout: I appealed the decision to make sure. And they told me that there was no file in Glaser. And this is a guy whose business was taken over by Sidney Korshak, who has an FBI file the size of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. So I can only assume that the FBI saw Glaser as too small-time in terms of their interests to start a file on him.

Correspondent: Unless, of course, it was expunged in some capacity.

Teachout: It could have been. I don’t have any reason to think that it was and, since Korshak’s file wasn’t, I assumed that there simply wasn’t anything there. Armstrong’s file contains nothing of any interest because he didn’t play at political benefits. I mean, the FBI was aware of the fact that he used marijuana. Because he was vetted by the State Department. But other than that, there wasn’t anything that was even worth passing on in the book. I mention actually in one of the endnotes that he had a file and that its contents were of no interest. But Glaser — we were all on pins. I had actually alerted the Armstrong Archive that I FOIAed Glaser. Because no one had ever thought to do this before.

Correspondent: Wow.

Teachout: And it took me a year and a half from end to end, from the original Freedom of Information request to wrapping up the appeal and concluding that there just wasn’t anything there.

BSS #314: Terry Teachout (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

No

No. Not. Nipple. Noodle. No. Twat. Not. No N. No. Keep it no. One word. Did you hear me? No. No. No. No. Yes. Not exactly. No. Nugatory. Negative. Nipple. Stop. Not. No. No. No. Why no? No. No answer. No reply. No. No. No. No. No. No. Stop. Next sentence. No. No answer. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Know? No. It’s no. No. No. Recite. No. No. No. Yes. No. No. No. More nos. No. Nose. No. Nostril. No. No. No. No for no’s sake. Your orgasm’s fake. No. No. No. Bank balance? No. Tax returns? No. Republicans? No. No. No. It’s better. No. No. Beat? No. Nipple. Noodle. No. No. No. No. Pessimist? No. Nihilist? No. Any -ist? No. No. No. Noist. Gnomist. Gnome. No. Troll. No. No. No. What purpose? No. No. No. Pho. No. No. No. Should read this. Should Vado this. No. No. No. Stet. No. No. No. Tweet. Twit. Tit. No. Fuck. No. Fuck no. Fuck not. Fuck you. Fuck me. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Nip. No. No. No. No. Pull. No. No. No. No. No. Mad? No. Sad? No. Beast? No. Ugly? No. Beauty? … … … … … … … … Ellipse. Ellipse. Ellipse. Ellipse. Ellipse. Ellipse. No. No. No. Style? No. Words? No. Sentence? No. Answer? No. No. No. No. Economy? No. Sociology? No. Psychology? No. No. No. No. No sake. No. No state. No. Non. Null. Nyet. No. No. No. Same in Spanish. No. Conceptual exercise? No. Purpose? No. Corso? No. Coarse? No. Polysyllabic? No. Silly? … … … … … … … … Morse? No. Nipple. Noodle. No. Doodle. No. Poodle. No. No. No. Ellipse. Ellipse. Ellipse. No. Ellipse. No. Eclipse. No. No. No. No. No. Printable? No. Sendable? No. Flexible? No. Fungible? No. No. No. No. Repetition. No. No. Repetition. No. Ellipse. No. No. No. Not at all. No. Not at all. No. Appropriate? Yes. No. No. No. No. Pattern? Ha. No. No. No. Ha. No. No. No. Ha. Ho. Do the math. No. No. No. No. You can’t print this in a newspaper. You can’t print this in a magazine. You can’t print this in a blog. No. No. No. No. No. Does no have any meaning? No. It should. No. No. No. No. No. Context. No. No. No. Crucifix. No. No. No. No. Na. No. No. Nip. No. Tip. No. No. Sip. No. Stultify. No. Send. No. Shazam. No. Prism. No. Secret. No. CIA. FBI. DHS. No. No. No. No. Acronyms eat at the table. No. No. Experimental? Genius? No. No. Conceit? No. Purpose? No. Just imagine. No. Can’t imagine. No. Ideal no. The first no was uttered thousands of years ago. No. No. The second no was uttered shortly thereafter. No. No. No. Means nothing. No. Use it or lose it. No. No. No. Lingua franca. No. No. No. A cross-culture no. An ironic no. A surly no. A burly no. No. No. That’s what he said. No. No. State of mind. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

by Edward Champion

The Windshield of a VW Bus

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Every once in a while, I check the Social Security Death Index to see if he’s been chewed up by the maggots. I know that his parents are dead. Thirteen years ago, a few years before she died, I spoke with his mother on the phone. She begged me to come up. Her husband had just died. I didn’t. Wasn’t prepared. I also spoke with him on the phone. He said the wrong things. I hung up after ten minutes. There’s been no contact since.

His father was a CHP officer. His mother made mascot costumes. He was raised in the Midwest. He had a twin brother. There are many twins in my family. When he picked me up, I would stay at his parents’ house, where I was fed undercooked liver that was difficult to digest. I recall Rich Little booming from a television cabinet and endless blue spirals of cigarette smoke pervading the living room. We didn’t sit around a table to eat dinner. We scarfed it down before a blaring television. But his parents were kind and they did the best that they could. When he wasn’t kind to me, he would burn me with his cigarettes and bite me and beat me. When he comes up in family conversations, he is described in menacing and unfavorable terms that are well-earned. But I prefer to remember the kinder moments. An afternoon where we pulled over and secretly raced go-karts without telling her. He was still capable of that even after the accident. He was a stubborn man and he refused to wear his seatbelt. And when his entire body was thrown through the windshield of a VW bus, he was never quite the same. He could no longer control his savage instincts. I can’t even count the number of times I hid behind a locked door.

The Social Security Death Index informs me that he’s not yet dead. And I’m glad. I’m not afraid of him and I don’t hate him, although I have good reason to. After him, I wouldn’t let any other man that my mother brought home — and there were many, most dubious and desperate, some fat and balding, few enamored with children, all wanting to get into her pants — with the exception of one. But my mother screwed up that one golden opportunity. I pilfered my manhood from other models. From books. From films. From unknowing older friends. From a determination to be true to myself. Although I worried about the latter source. His family, you see, was big on Ayn Rand. And I read her books and thought they were bunk. This probably encouraged my anti-authoritarian streak.

He drank. He swore. He smoked. He regretted the job at the chemical factory. The one he needed to keep the money coming in. And there wasn’t much. For a time, there was only one car — a rusting Lincoln Mercury called the Silver Bullet — and we’d wake up before sunrise to ensure that he could get to work on time. He was often lazy. From this, I developed my work ethic. He did read a bit, but it was mostly horrible poetry that was then in fashion. He wanted to be a writer. But he was often lazy. Writers can’t be lazy.

I’ve already passed the age he was when I was born. And I didn’t expect to think about him much, even when I saw friends lose fathers and helped as many as I could through the pain. I had healed the scars a long time ago. But memory is a funny thing. One sight, one stray bit of music, one smell, one sight, and the storehouse explodes. One shouldn’t relive the past. It is a surrogate reality as deadly as drugs, paranoia, or self-deception. But it never entirely gives up its magnetic pull. Sometimes I think about him.

I’m not married. I have no children. But he did at my age. I share some of his qualities. I’m happier than he ever was. I probably swear more than he ever did. I haven’t been thrown through the windshield of a VW bus. I remember to buckle up. Sometimes.

by Edward Champion

Killer Queen

Evil Living: “Roughly 48 minutes into the conversation, Sheriff Arpaio was cut short while talking about his stance on immigration by a group of protestors singing to the tune of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’

“After efforts to quell the crowd failed, Sheriff Arpaio and the panel of journalists interviewing him promptly removed their microphones and exited the stage of the First Amendment Forum.”

by Edward Champion

Barack Obama: The West Point Operator

obamawestpoint

President Barack Obama stood tonight before the seated West Point cadets and revealed himself to be a shallow political opportunist, a man who views mortal sacrifice with all the cold and uncomprehending analysis of a clinical dilettante who is in over his head. Obama stared hard into his twin prompters, as if expecting some illusory plane to crash and conflagrate. One detected the whiff of self-sabotage as this newly christened lame duck spoke without spontaneity, failing to hit any note that even approximated empathy. Yes, he had signed letters of condolence to the families of every American who has given up a life. But there was nothing in his dead eyes to suggest a solace that extended beyond bureaucratic acts or a leader who knew what he was doing. This was shallow and unconsummated political theater, and, for me, a profound feeling of nausea kicked in at the ten minute mark.

Obama preferred to regale the crowd with hollow tough talk, but, judging from the few cutaway shots, the West Point throngs didn’t seem terribly convinced. He reminded us all, including those brave progressives daring to huddle around high-def sets for some benefit of the doubt, that he was the Commander-in-Chief. In a line that will no doubt be fiercely argued by febrile teabaggers, he declared that he had seen “firsthand the terrible wages of war.” It was as if he still needed to prove something just less than a year into his Presidency. But in an age of economic disaster, unseen relief, and international terror, the time for needless reminders and phony platitudes has now passed. Actions that live up to the mandate have become beyond necessary, and Obama demonstrated again that he cannot deliver. This geeky, number-crunching adolescent, who painfully reminded us that he had once stood against the Iraq War, pretended once again to be an adult, and his speech was a firm betrayal of the alleged ethos that secured his November victory. When that dreadful noun “hope” came up thrice, applied to Afghanistan’s untenable wasteland, the linguistic political operator and almost certain one-term President came out of the closet. It was also an unpardonable insult for Obama to suggest that “we must come together to end this war successfully,” a sentiment at odds with the exigencies of healthy democracy and language uncomfortably close to the previous Oval Office hick now laughing his ass off in Dallas. One expects a failure to grasp the realities of human conflict from some desperate corporate leader making an awkward speech at a company retreat, but not the ostensible leader of the free world. Had a cadet yelled, “You lie!” tonight, I would have applauded him as a patriot.

This was a hard spectacle for anyone on the left to endure. The social networks were strangely silent. It was eerily symbolic that YouTube opted to live-stream an Alicia Keys concert over tonight’s cold hard truth. Obama, the man who had fueled his base through the Internet, had been abandoned by his most fervent online boosters. And this sizable cluster was really the canton who needed to hear this speech more than anyone else. Perhaps they will be braver in the morning, when they can stomach some predawn douse of icy and abrasive water. Obama’s speech was a tremendous slur against optimism and possibility, for it invited cynicism rather than respect. This was not a delivery that could galvanize the hardscrabble American heart, for it offered only fungible realities.

Obama failed to sell the brave recruits or the American people on the reasons behind the Afghanistan surge. Lives would be lost, but for what? These unspecified threats and specious connections were the reasons why so many of us opposed Bush. Obama said that he owed us “a mission that is clearly defined, and worthy of your service,” but remained too general on the details. His objectives involved denying al-Qaeda a safe haven, reversing the Taliban’s momentum, and denying them the ability to overthrow the government. But these goals carried distressing echoes of the administrative arrogance depicted in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, and remained doubly troubling with the assumptive hubris. For Obama was there to tell us that those seeing another Vietnam were relying upon “a false reading of history” and offered no text in return. His inference rested on the principle that Vietnam was the natural parallel, rather than the failed ten-year campaign by Russia, much less the ongoing clusterfuck in Iraq, which, in Obama’s words, was “well-known and need not be repeated here.”

Obama claimed that “this is not just America’s war,” He preferred to mimic the language of our previous President, awkwardly jutting his chin in deference to the eight-year charlatan’s cowboy tic. But it did not seem to occur to him that such arrogance — conveyed through subdued and unconvincing burlesque and a stunning failure to be even remotely real — is not how any nation builds coalitions.

This was a Powerpoint presentation delivered without the slides. Obama sweated, looking like a boxer past his prime, and didn’t seem to comprehend that human lives were in the balance. When Obama stated that “the days of providing a blank check are over,” one was speedily reminded of the no-strings-attached check handled to the rapacious thugs at Goldman Sachs and the $787 billion stimulus package that has allegedly “created or saved” 640,000 jobs (or about $248,000 spent for each job). Obama offered a timeline, but for all of his talk about “addressing these costs openly and honestly,” he was reticent to drop specific pecuniary numbers for his escalation plan. He offered yet another hollow promise to close Guantanamo Bay, but the travesty that continues to sully alleged American virtues must end with a decisive action.

When speaking about Afghanistan, Obama looked directly into the camera, as if expecting a pockmarked population to watch, and said, “We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours.” But I did not believe him. And there is no reason to expect an Afghanistan civilian to believe him. Before the speech, two of his officials had used the word “surge” in relation to these developments. And Malalai Joya, writing bravely in The Guardian, intimated that an escalation of troops is a war crime against her country. (Both links found helpfully through Glenn Greenwald.)

None of these concerns were considered. There remained the cliched faith in “workers and businesses who will rebuild our economy,” but none of this could atone for the pressing reality that more than a tenth of us are without a livelihood and nearly one fifth of African-American males are far worse off. As Obama heads on to Oslo to collect his Nobel Peace Prize, one is reminded of the 1973 Swedish hypocrisy. One begins to hear Kissinger’s duplicities in Obama’s dulcet voice.

Which leads anyone living in the waking world to conclude justly that Obama’s idealism is gone. His rhetoric is hollow. This is a dead parrot.