alias Bruce.

Update re: the case of Mark Byron, who a judge punished for bad-mouthing his estranged wife on Facebook:

Byron emailed me yesterday in response to my recent post, in which I criticized his judgment in trash-talking his soon-to-be ex-wife on his Facebook page while I also pointed to the real freedom-of-speech questions his case raises. His email to me was polite and reasonable, and so I am reprinting it here (minus his contact information), followed by my own take on what he says.

MARK BYRON'S EMAIL:

Bruce,

Thanks for taking the time to write about me on your blog.  I'd like to encourage you to take a second look at my story, along with the facts of my case.  You make some great points-  that this is in fact a very interesting case to everyone.  Some of your statements about me are a little unfair, though.  I encourage you to take a look at the now public posts on my Facebook wall, for starters.  www.facebook.com/byronphoto - there, you'll see the confession email from the fellow who 'gave' my soon-to-be ex-wife his login credentials to Facebook which allowed her to see my private posting.  I agree with you that the site is not as public as some think that it is - however, I have more than 12 years in IT background.  I am an MCSE for example - and understand a great deal about privacy and security on computers as well as on Facebook.  I utilize groups on Facebook and used every bit of available security that Facebook has to offer.  Please consider writing a follow up once you've had a chance to take a closer look at my story.  Feel free to call me or write me with any questions you may have.

Sincerely,

Mark Byron

MY TAKE:

Byron, a New York photographer, is clearly staying on top of his story online, and I commend him for that. As I wrote previously, there is no way for we bystanders to know how right Byron may or may not be in having called his wife evil and vindictive, or how right she may or may not be in having filed for a protective order and claimed that the comments on his Facebook page frightened her. That is between the two of them and the court. What is clear, though, is that Byron badly overestimated the privacy that Facebook allegedly affords him and his FB "friends." Whatever his IT background, it appears that he still holds this mistaken belief, as shown in his statement in his email about "the fellow who 'gave' my soon-to-be ex-wife his login credentials to Facebook which allowed her to see my private posting." Truth is, in real terms there is no such thing as a "private posting" on Facebook. Facebook is so hackable that, with or without someone's willingly handing over a person's login info, anything posted there is at the mercy of anyone who has sufficient skills and ill intent. Posting anything on Facebook in the belief that it will be seen "only" by your "friends" is excruciatingly naive at best. It is a mistake that I hope and trust Byron will not repeat. Meanwhile, the issue of what a person has the free-speech right to say and not say on Facebook remains a legal football. With users' erratic learning curve on the limitations of social media privacy, the technical reality that all Facebook speech is de facto public doesn't necessarily mean that FB users who post provocative things intend for them to have meaning beyond their "friends" circle. But right now judges have tons of room to interpret, and make, law on this. Which is why the smart thing for we users to do is to treat such media as if they are entirely public.

The Jim Crow side of "cosmopolitan" Europe is showing more than ever these days,

as reflected, for instance, in an exchange of comments (including one by yours truly) in response to Steve Hynd's post at Agonist.org about the motivation underlying European treatment of North African boat people.

Many Europeans are showing their true colors about "those people" in a manner similar to that of the many white Americans for whom a Rick Santorum's hateful preachings offer self-destructive solace.

What goes unnoticed in both Europe and the United States – in addition to the sheer distractive value of demonizing poor brown people instead of CEOs and their hired political representatives – is the actual origin of the wave of northward immigration from Africa and Mexico: the dysfunction of neocolonial economies that starve their citizens for the benefit of European- and American-based commerce. Europe likes to forget that its colonial carving up of previously stable African nations and economies is the direct precursor to their current states of disaster. And the U.S. conveniently ignores the key role of dire Mexican poverty and political chaos in enabling American banks' benefits from the American-bound drug trade and American commerce's pleasing profits from Mexican maquiladoras and cheap illegal immigrant farm and service labor.

It's the same scheme on both sides of the Atlantic: diverting the anger of the working classes by encouraging them to kick the goose that lays the golden egg for the rich.

Here is the exchange from The Agonist, in which I have substituted the word "Person" for all names except my own: 

Germany When I lived in Munich in the 60s and 70s the Germans were extremely xenophobic. Munich had about a 15% Turkish population. They did all the grunt jobs the Germans wouldn't do - sound familiar? The Germans/Bavarians hated the Turks. I'm sure they would have sent them all back except they didn't want to do the shit jobs they did. Of course they could never become citizens of Germany but then neither could Americans. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:00pm

Probably still similar. I have a friend who recently moved to Germany. She is American, of German extraction, and speaks German. Blue eyes, blonde hair. She was still treated as an outsider at her first job in the countryside. She reports it's better in Munich. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:05pm

OK I too have blond hair and blue eyes and spoke German. I was treated very well in Munich. Of course I worked with the Bavarian State Police and many of them were friends so that might have had something to do with it. It was strange but the Bavarians had a fascination with black GIs and frequently befriended them. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:30pm

Anecdotally... To be African-American in Europe (France / Germany) is not the same as being African-American here. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:35pm

Damn straight. Ask Jack Johnson, Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, the Tuskegee Airmen (of whom my Dad was one), the entire generation of post-bop black jazz musicians, or virtually any black American artist who has spent time there. In my travels as an African American in France, Germany, and Italy some years ago, I found some fascination with me (one night when I walked into an arty Berlin bar an entire line of young hipster women stood and invited me to light their cigarettes for them, and it wasn't because I'm some irresistible hunk). I also found, though, that my American-ness counted (often negatively) more than my skin color. And, most tellingly, I saw an entirely different set of wickedly racist rules applying to Turks and North Africans. In Germany Turks were the niggers of the culture -- persecuted, abused, and ridiculed (it's the first place where I ever heard "Turk jokes"), and in France North Africans were widely hated and sometimes even killed by mobs. This was years ago, mind you, but if anything it appears that Europe's post-colonial race hate is showing more than ever now that the recession is slamming The Motherland. –Bruce A Jacobs March 14, 2012 - 10:01pm

"We breathe in and out,

and we just watch that. Nothing else. It doesn’t matter if we get enlightenment or not. It doesn’t matter if our friends get enlightened faster. Who cares? We are just breathing. We just sit straight and watch the breath in and out. Nothing else. We let go of our ambitions."

That quote is from Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, discussing a technique for Buddhist meditation.

I am not a Buddhist. I am not religious. I do, however, think there is a lot to be said for spending time unruled by reflexive intention, or what some Buddhists call "habit mind." Paying attention to breathing while allowing trained intentions to swirl around any way they want is a good way to loosen such habit. The funny thing is that the more you do this, the more your intentions and observations clarify themselves. You could call it mental Windex.

Breath – especially for those of us here in the clattering cast-iron heart of Western capitalism – is highly underrated. Breath lies close to the center of a mammal's actual life. I'd say it pays to consciously hang out there at regular intervals.

Here is what Rilke says:

Breathing: you invisible poem! Complete
interchange of our own
essence with world-space. You counterweight
in which I rhythmically happen.

Single wave-motion whose
gradual sea I am;
you, most inclusive of all our possible seas–
space grown warm.

How many regions in space have already been
inside me. There are winds that seem like
my wandering son.

Do you recognize me, air, full of places I once absorbed?
You who were the smooth bark,
roundness, and leaf of my words.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 1

Thanks to Mushim.

Who knows what happens when people die?

You don't. I don't. Religions sure as hell don't. But we Western industrial types are especially confounded because we are completely and categorically out of touch with the continuity of energy. That mystery – death – is the edge of our flat world. And our ignorance fuels our obsession with the razor edge of that moment.

The Republican presidential wannabees,

of whom only Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum appear to have survived as real contenders, are interesting solely for what they reveal about the murderous meanness of core Republican voters.

In televised debates, the Republican suitors drew lusty cheers from live G.O.P. audiences for having executed record numbers of prison inmates in Texas, for advocating government control over how American women occupy their bodies, and for calling for ruthless treatment of economic refugees from America's closest neocolonial neighbor to the south.

The only remaining question is whether the Republican Party is terminally short-sighted in its pursuit of the Kill-the-Pig-Drink-Its-Blood vote, or whether the party is betting on some, uh, tragic calamity that would permanently remove Barack Obama from the scene (I think you know what I'm talking about) and would subsequently leave the 2012 election open to the G.O.P.'s brand of raving fascist nationalism, or whether they are patiently building the foundation for what they hope will be a future decisively fascist majority of fearful, resentful voters.

Part of what captivates me about the mob

is that it is tribal. It has clans. Members have codes and taboos that cannot be bared in public. And they take on street names drawn from a more natural and gutturally symbolic world than tags like "Michael" and "Jerome" -- say, for example, "Big Tuna" and "Joe Bananas," both of whom were real-life mob figures. Or my all-time favorite, which actually comes from a film: "Jimmy the Cheese Man" from The Pope of Greenwich Village.

Youth gangs, similarly, dig into symbolism for identities that mean something beyond the often-disposable sound-gaming of American naming. Kids caught in a void of violent nihilism take on vividly personal handles for themselves and others: "Teeth," "Big Eye," "Snapper," "Sleepy." Names that say something about the bearer. The way that, say, some West African names do.

I think one of the most eloquent movie scenes ever is from the film Pulp Fiction, when Bruce Willis's fugitive boxer character tells a cab driver who remarks on his name, "I'm an American. My name doesn't mean shit."

Part of what mobs and gangs do is fill this selfhood void -- but with reactionary, racist, misogynist, fake "outlaw" outlets for American males, especially angry young males, for whom the vanilla concoction of shrink-wrapped American male identity means exactly nothing. Patriarchal capitalism has succeeded in alienating them from essence. Their substitute version of rawness, a kind of kamikaze fraternity, is their attempt at medicine for their ailment. It's a sick manifestation of a real desire.

None of that is the least bit funny. Still, there is something about the following rendition of Sesame Street's Ernie and Bert doing the classic Joe Pesci/Robert DeNiro desert scene from the Martin Scorsese film Casino that paints a perfect, hilariously absurd picture of this kind of cartoon barbarity:

 

(The trolls at YouTube have blocked direct embedding, but when "watch on YouTube" pops up, click it and you can watch it.)

Speaking of art and resistance,

Tao Seeger (center), Pete Seeger (right)

here is a piece on American musician Tao Seeger, who, to quote the lead-in, "speaks to Ahram Online on music and its important role in revolutions over the course of history, following his performance on the night of the Egyptian Revolution's first anniversary last month."

Tao, grandson of musical fighter Pete Seeger, says plenty in the interview that we need to hear right now, including detailing the ways (and the eras) in which art has always been a mainstay of dissent when the respectable classes go silent. Take a look.

Agony, Art, and Apple.

It is a cliché that artists are among the last-ditch truthtellers in a society. It is also true.

These days, for example, as corporate journalists become less willing and less able to contradict the ruling script of American life (e.g., there is no alternative to 21st-century monopoly capitalism as a way of running our country or organizing the world), it is increasingly the artists who help break the actual news about what is wrong and what change is possible.

Who is passionately exposing lies and delusions on the part of both the Obama corporatists and the dog-whistle right? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert -- comedians, for God's sake. Who wrote a famous open letter to Laura Bush declining her dinner invitation with the explanation that Ms. Bush had chosen to live in quiet harmony with a murderous and criminal regime? Internationally-celebrated poet Sharon Olds.

And who, now, is sending chills down corporate and consumer spines with his little one-man show about the people who actually make your iPhone? An overweight, nervy actor and monologist named Mike Daisey, whose theatrical monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," has brought audiences the story of Chinese workers leaping to their deaths from factory complex roofs to escape a wretched life in service to Apple. The New York Times and other corporate media have since picked up pieces of the story of how the electronics industry runs horrifically dangerous, hellishly abusive, city-sized factories. But it was a solo guy with a touring one-man show who told it.

It's one more reason why artists should have way more societal stature: they are among our default sources of truth when the official tellers choose to shut up.

Read on Daisey's blog how Apple is now acting very, very afraid of these revelations. And listen here to an edited live performance of Daisey's monologue aired on the radio show This American Life.

The other night, at a jazz gig I played

as a drummer in a hot trio at a tony club, the club owner got very drunk -- something I gather he often does.

In the middle of a set in which we three musicians played our asses off for a packed and appreciative house, the bar owner walked up to the stage and, while everyone watched in shock, he launched into a long, loud, drunken rant about how the band was playing way too loudly and it was screwing up his business and it was all my fault. Me. The drummer. He stood squarely in front of me and my drum set. He shouted in my face that all of the volume problems started with me, and his patrons upstairs needed to make conversation, and the band sounded like a train running through the building, and he was the boss and I had better do something about it.

In a room where the audience had been giddy with our performance, you could suddenly hear a pin drop.

The rest of the details don't matter. Suffice it to say that I was both cool and blindly furious, and the crowd sided with the band, and the drunken club owner ended up making a meaningless apology, and I'll be damned if I'll ever set foot in his cursed little club again.

This is part of the turf that a jazz musician walks: Having the most intense art form that America itself has ever produced relegated to gin mills where people yak and drink too much; having this country's most creative musical intellectuals (and I'm not talking about myself, but about jazz musicians at the very top of the art, who as a threat to white superiority still face a certain stubborn denial and disrespect of their role in the culture) treated as mere entertainers.

Sure, I, or we as a band, may have been playing too loudly for the conversational upstairs crowd who felt our playing through the floor. But what is John Coltrane's music -- we played the seminal "Giant Steps" that night -- doing in a bar where a sloppily wasted white tavern keeper feels entitled to publicly lecture hard-practiced black jazz musicians? Why was the club owner trying to humiliate me when he could easily have avoided the spectacle with a private conversation? And who the hell was he to even play cultural critic in the first place? What is such compositionally and improvisationally brilliant music doing in a speakeasy, anyway? What was I doing there?

That's the problem with being jazz musicians in the United States. We have our hands on something that the dominant culture feels it can't afford to fully recognize: black creativity that is part Beethoven and part shaman. Over the decades, we have cleanly played our hand with our former slavemasters, seen them and raised them, upped the cultural ante on what they feel is their very best, and their response at the table has been a sullen silence, eyes averted, with the occasional self-comforting and inherently racist outburst about our being too primal for their company.

Talk about dysfunction and ingratitude.

This is precisely why Europe and Japan -- having less of a vested interest than America in undervaluing the breakthrough Afri-Euro aesthetic of the Louis Armstrongs and Josephine Bakers and Aimé Cesaires -- remain magnets for black American artists who want to be seen for who we actually are and for what we actually do.

Meanwhile, here on the 2012 American plantation of cultural production, it's still too often pearls before swine. But there is also this: the mere fact that this awful nightclub story isn't my typical experience as a jazz musician, and that the crowd stood with we musicians against the drunken owner, and that jazz and its audiences manage to thrive from corner bars to Lincoln Center, says a lot about the loving indestructibility of music and of humanness in the face of even the most wickedly pervasive machinery.

[2/8/2012 12:30pm EST: I re-edited the final paragraph to better express all that I see and feel here.]

A fellow musician mentioned the other night

that it's a bad idea for musicians to "listen with their eyes."

What he meant was that when we decide how creative or talented or worthy of respect a musician is on the basis of their received recognition by an audience or their image among connoisseurs, we make bad decisions. The only true way to know what you hear in the music is to listen to the music.

I like the way he put this. It's true for musicians, but it is also true for poets, readers of novels, sports fans, theater folks, painters, voters -- anybody who needs to have the clearest take they can manage on someone's contribution.

This isn't always easy. Sometimes huge popularity is -- wrongly -- a signal to us that someone is a hack. And sometimes obscurity is damn well deserved. It's all subjective, of course, but it's still complicated.

Take the hugely successful 1960s/70s rock band Grand Funk Railroad. They were a spectacular sensation among teenagers who wanted their music loud, brash, self-righteous, and infused with pot smoke. (I know. I was there.) Writers who "knew" music (a timelessly common condition among critics who know how to listen but not how to play) trashed GFR in print with bloody fury. And they were often right. Frontman Mark Farner did suck as a guitarist and was largely full of shit as a writhing, shirtless, pseudo-philosophical rock poet. The band did play to counterculture teenybopper clichés. Producer Terry Knight was in fact a slickster whose GFR album cover concepts and band marketing rivaled the product packaging of Alka Seltzer and Shake & Bake.

But Grand Funk Railroad rocked its ass off -- mostly because monster bassist Mel Schacher and drummer Don Brewer were among the first big-time white rhythm section players to understand a basic foundation of black R&B: when you synchronize the bass line with the bass drum, you get the funk. You create the gut thump. Go back and listen to vintage GFR, and you'll hear a white band that picked up on part of the seismic essence of James Brown and other funk pioneers. These white boys heard the underlying real shit, and they rendered it well enough in coliseums to drive thousands of bodies into a frenzy. Sure, like a lot of groups, they had help from ganja, acid, and Madison Avenue. But Grand Funk Railroad was and always will be a classic ass-kicking band, no matter how many armchair virtuosos cursed them in reviews of their albums and concerts.

That is why, when I listen to musicians who I believe thoroughly suck, I try -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not -- to listen beneath that for something I need to hear. And it's why some musicians, far more accomplished than I, try to do the same thing when they listen to me.