A Review of Don Cheadle's "Miles Ahead"

The jazz cognoscenti have lined up in pretty lock step to slam the Miles Davis movie, “Miles Ahead.” From nit-picking continuity issues including clothing and the microphones used to wholesale rejection of the film’s high concept, disdaining “Miles Ahead” has almost become a litmus test of a critic’s jazz credibility.

Perhaps the weakest knee-jerk reaction on the part of any artist to criticism is, “You just don’t get it, do you?” But in my opinion such a reaction is to some degree warranted on the part of Cheadle’s creative team.

The biopic has always been popular, but it really is the current genre du jour. America’s obsession with celebrity, its propensity to fall prey to cults of personality has birthed what seems to the layman movie-goer an unprecedented interest in thumbnail reductions of larger-than-life lives, as has recently been done to James Brown, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and others, each to its own varying degree of success. The question I would ask if presented with the daunting task of bringing Miles Davis to life on film, and the question I am pretty confident Don Cheadle asked is, “What would Miles do?” And I think the answer is that he would point his horn opposite the expected direction.

What I infer from Cheadle’s choice to present a sequence that is fictional in terms of events but arguably factual in terms of human disposition is that not only was the entirety of Miles’ life too prodigious to address in a hundred minutes, a just representation of anything purportedly factual would by its very nature be a distortion and a betrayal, antithetical to the entire Miles Davis ethos. Cheadle instead sought to capture some of the complexity and turmoil of the man rather than stand as some kind of self-appointed arbiter of the relative importance of this or that component of Miles’ life and music. Cheadle played the opportunity like Miles would play a solo, with ferocity and daring.

The action flick nature of “Miles Ahead” was entertaining and also served to portray how fiercely protective of their work the great black music giants of the 20^th century had to be. They had a real understanding of its value, and a real understanding of how willing and able the record industry was to acquire it below its value or to steal it outright. It is this spirit that made Ray Charles insist on being paid in one dollar bills so he could count them with certainty. For these great artists, their unprotected intellectual property was all they had, and depending on how they managed it, it was worth anywhere between millions of dollars and not one cent.  

For those craving elements of a biopic, perhaps the steadily used flashback to the love story between Miles and Frances ought to have been enough. For me, it was. And as a modestly accomplished amateur trumpet player, I was very impressed by Cheadle’s approximation of Miles’ Julliard-honed trumpet technique.

From a visual and an auditory perspective, the film is a feast. It is as chaotic as it is ordered, like jazz itself. The greatest solo, the greatest performance, the greatest album, the greatest career in jazz always leaves its listener transformed but not necessarily resolved. It is an art form that is much about questions as it is answers. The irresolute nature of living is how the most moving jazz sits in the ear, and leaves the jazz lover or the life liver with a feeling of melancholy that is at once belied by an overwhelming gratitude for having been so lucky as to have had a passing whiff of it, however illusory, however temporary, however imperfect. Like Miles said, “It’s the notes you don’t play.” I think Cheadle et al heard that suggestion and did something akin to what Miles would do: play something fresh and exciting, leave a lot out and maybe split a few notes along the way.

What Kaepernick Does Next Will Determine His Civic Legacy

The Kaepernick story is the perfect storm of American patriotism colliding directly with the civil rights movement and teasing out the hypocritical and heartfelt extremes of both. As backyard beanbag and barbecue champions across the land now seize this opportunity to use the n-word between their f-words, the shrine of vicarious American violence at last has a lamb to sacrifice at its altar.

Anheuser Busch’s flagship product, Budweiser, has temporarily been renamed America, just in time for drunken halftime Kaepernick hating. The #7 shirts burned in effigy are posted all over YouTube. Kaepernick merchandise boycotts have been called for. The 2016-2017 season is not yet under way and Kaepernick has thrown a can of gasoline onto the raging bonfire of alt-right identity comfort that has recently become enheartened by the Trump campaign. Kaepernick has sixteen full weeks to continue dispatching salt into this gaping wound, and the opportunity for a full NFL season of race-baiting joy is being salivated over by opportunist pundits from the left and right.

My immediate thought was that Kaepernick’s passive-aggressive refusal to stand during the national anthem was an antagonistic, sullen and unhelpful means of expression, and that if he wished to contribute to the national dialog on this topic, which is very much welcoming of high-profile voices right now, he could do so in a way that doesn't throw such conspicuous disrespect on a class of people who absolutely do not deserve it, which is to say, veterans. The anthem means a lot me, but it means even more to veterans, and to accept harm to the hearts of our veterans as reasonable collateral damage for this unoriginal, vague and uncreative means of protest seemed to me at first blush an insensitive and disappointing play.

That said, what are we talking about right now? Oppression in America through the lens of Kaepernick’s protest. So, shut my mouth. He did it. He elevated the volume of the conversation, if not yet its clarity. He did what he wanted to do and he did it successfully. But, and it’s a very big but, the job is not over. He now has an opportunity, and I think an obligation, to offer an articulate howl of protest and to be a mouthpiece through which some of America’s persistent racial injustices can be described and identified for redress.

If he elects not to do that, if he prefers instead to keep making this dull, imprecise and gratuitously cruel gesture every week, for the mere fact alone of it delivering undeserved harm to American veterans, his protest is a loser for me. If, on the other hand, he assumes the mantle of courage and explains his frustration with the pace of civil rights reform, the unacceptability of double standards in policing and other areas of racial inequity, and does so in clear language in an open forum, I’ll applaud as loudly as anyone. In my opinion, he should hop onto this immediately and make a gesture of good faith.

Picture this. Kaepernick lays out the frustrations of minority Americans loud and clear at a press conference, and then accompanies that with language expressing hope. Were he to say, for instance, that the elevated attention to issues of racial imparity in policing makes him optimistic for real change in the near future, so optimistic in fact that he will stand proudly for the anthem throughout the entirety of the regular season, the entire tenor of his gesture would change from cynical to hopeful and from dark to vibrant.

A gesture of that sort would be a masterstroke for Kaepernick, and maybe that’s what he has in mind. He needs to do something, because without putting a finer point on his protest, it is doomed to have an identity rooted only in the problem rather than in the solution.

The Last Time I Left California...

Let me tell you a story. It was February 1989. I was leaving San Francisco, having experienced a pretty devastating sequence of events that had combined to lead me to the conclusion that I wanted to return home to New England after having lived in the Bay area for four years. I was fired for suspicion of theft from the music store where I was working (I didn’t do it), my band had just dissolved, and the woman I was dating had committed suicide. Each of these events merits its own detailed telling, but none of them are the subject of this recounting. I suppose it is relevant that all three of these negative occurrences happened in the same couple of months, and all were in the vicinity of an approaching Christmas. I was devastated. In any case, I packed up and began the 3000-mile drive back to my native New Hampshire.

A vicious blizzard had come roaring across Siberia, through Alaska and Canada and had settled into an airstream pushing its way across northern California. It caught up to me in Reno, Nevada and followed me all the way across the country, shutting down Route 80, Route 70, and Route 40, forcing me to traverse our fair land on Route 10. As I passed through Texas, which was a sheet of ice, and limped into Arkansas, I saw a sign that heralded the proximity of Fort Smith, the small city where my father was born and raised, and I resolved to visit it.

My father died at 42 years old when I was 16. A Yale graduate, he never saw me get accepted into his Alma Mater, nor of course graduate from it, and in truth we never had an adult conversation, so naturally at age 30, I had some unresolved issues with my father. I had been to Fort Smith only once before when I was four or maybe five years old, and I thought it might be a fine opportunity to exorcise some demons.

I pulled into town and had lunch at a drug store counter, asking some of the folks if they knew of him or his family and the answer was repeatedly “no,” so I drove around a little bit and spotted a Catholic church. I parked, got out and walked up to the doors. I gave them a hearty tug, but they were locked. As I pulled on the unrelenting double doors, something inside of me snapped. I collapsed on the walkway leading to the entrance and fell into a fit of uncontrolled sobbing. When I pulled myself together enough to get up, I spotted a statue of the Virgin Mary and knelt before it and prayed.

I looked down at the pedestal and there at Mary’s feet was a beautiful, perfect green pine cone, still moist and pulpy, exuding the fertility of the deep South. I picked it up, still sobbing, and brought it with me. As I drove away, maybe having done myself some modicum of good, this song that I link to at the bottom of this story, The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics featuring Paul Carrack, came on the radio. I think it was the first time I ever heard this song, and I had to pull over and listen to it, a process that birthed yet another round deep, heaving sobs.

I will remain ever grateful to Paul Carrack for writing this song, and for singing it so beautifully, and also to my higher power for forcing me to drive through Arkansas, for showing me the sign to the place of my father's birth and youth, and lastly for playing DJ that day, and providing me with a piece of music that I needed to hear. I kept that pinecone for several years until it finally crumbled to dust.

http://youtu.be/uGDA0Hecw1k

Nature Abhors a Vacuum, as Does Politics: Enter the Libertarians

Libertarian doctrine varies dramatically within the confines of Libertarianism (part of Libertarianism I guess, being as Libertarian as you care to be), but in its purest form, it is a Utopia of strict objectivism that appeases the prevailing left with a staunch adherence to personal liberty and does the same to the right with a likewise laissez-faire attitude toward business. The ruling elite in a Libertarian paradise cedes all questions of personal behavior to the citizenry, as it should be, but in devil’s trade for that, the personal behavior of commerce becomes likewise unregulated, and that’s a problem. It seems to me to be a bit of a self-assigned hall pass to rapacious mercantilists whose personal appetites veer from churchly ways.

It’s Republicans with bongs. It’s feeling bad about cutting school lunches. The core Libertarian message is that if things get bad enough, the people for whom it is bad will pool resources and correct the problem. The inferred corollary is, “and if they don’t, screw ‘em.” Whatever the attitude toward social safety nets, when it comes to infrastructure and public services, systems are required, and they need to be consistent and maintained to good health, and under the fat-trimming knives of Libertarian leadership, everything from pothole repairs to hospitals to soup kitchens falls under the butcher’s gimlet eye.

There is a strong advocacy of Libertarianism within certain elements of the tech sector, notably the highest echelons of management and ownership, one that suffers from a myopia that relates significantly to Obama’s both celebrated and reviled utterance, “You didn’t build that.” It’s the tech wealthy becoming wealthier, perceived as due reward for their pioneering individualism, conveniently forgetting that the technology their new technology hitchhikes on was developed through government research. The same is true of pharmacology, space exploration and many other fields that have more and more come into the realm of private commercial ventures. After a few decades of Libertarianism, all of that seed research dries up and you’re left with a passel of cutthroat entrepreneurs fighting over the last leftovers from the final sustained periods of pure research.

The first thing Libertarians will tell you is that they are fiscally conservative but socially liberal. Social liberalism requires funding though, and until you square with that, you’re not socially liberal. That’s just the way it is sold in the marketing materials, not as Randian feudalism, but rather ultimate freedom. It’s a second-rate philosophy popularized by a third-rate novelist whose big idea should have died right along with her.

Libertarians are refugees from the Republican Party for whom financial and environmental deregulation was proceeding too slowly. Or maybe in Johnson and Weld’s cases they were sick of being on the B-List and smelled blood in the water so they decided to make some hay while the election was unstable. The driving precept of Libertarianism remains unfettered capitalism, which wouldn’t annoy me quite so much except that it is always sold under a predictive model of spontaneous social cohesion that holds no historical model.

The Libertarian concept of a free market is flawed at its core because we no longer club each other to steal wildebeest meat, which is the beginning and the end of pure free markets. Anything more than that is influenced by structure. The restructuring of these “free” markets according to the whims of Libertarianism as pertains to patents, contracts, property, monopoly and enforcement (and these are the economic pillars that truly matter) are always going to be to the advantage of an elite that knows better, a kind of presumptive benevolent monarchy of the smug. The trick for hardcore Libertarians is to get as close to the clubs and wildebeest model as possible while keeping the lottery mentality afloat in the minds of a trusting public. I prefer an accountable democracy.

I Don’t Buy the “Hillary Sucks” Narrative

At all. I never did. In one prepared essay some time ago on this blog I stated that the Democratic party floated what I believed were two excellent candidates, and in Wayne’s World-speak added, “One is just way more excellent than the other,” referring of course to Bernie Sanders. I manned phone banks for Bernie, wrote letters to editors and contributed several hundred dollars to the Sanders campaign, and in my opinion we blew it in passing over Sanders as our choice in this election. But as one who has a way of blowing things in my own free time, believe me when I tell you, you can blow something, and then you can blow something big. Electing Donald Trump would be blowing something big.

I’m going to dispense with the third party argument in short shrift here because it really has no place. If someone wants to make the case that a vote for Johnson or Stein has a forward impact on the presidency, please take me up on the following bet. Your one thousand dollars against my ten thousand dollars that either Trump or Clinton will win the presidency. If Johnson or Stein wins, ten grand is yours. If not, I get one large out of little Tiffany’s college fund. We know one thing with absolute certainty about the election in November. It will be Clinton or Trump. Period. If you wish to influence that, vote for Clinton or Trump. That’s where it begins and ends. The two-party system is baked into the constitution, it’s baked into our history, and it is baked into the industrial-election complex. And it’s not going to change this year. You lose voting third party, you really lose writing in, and you really, really lose staying home.

If you think voting third party is sending a message and if you’re in a “sure-fire” Hillary state like California, maybe make your Green vote in good conscience, but that kind of gaming your own elections may have made the difference in England leaving the European Union. Whatever message someone might be sending with a third party vote, the one that is heard is that there are “fill in the blank” percentage of Americans who have checked out of any sphere of influence. And it’s a shame. The Greens mindset in particular resonates in terms of policy across a good bit of the Democratic platform. People considering voting Green had to have observed an undeniable pushing to the left that occurred as a result of political brinkmanship on Sanders’ part. That kind of influence would be utterly lost under a Trump administration. The Green Party can’t even qualify on the ballot for the presidency in half of American states, making those votes the definition of spoilers, and a clear indicator that the chief energies of the Greens might best be spent in state and local races to establish a solid political base before just making a series of desperate runs at the top office. It’s no more than advertising for the party, and doing so at the expense of the admittedly flawed version of Democracy we observe in the US.

I don’t think voting third party is wise, and I additionally believe the “lesser of two evils” riff is largely a canard. There’s only one evil in this campaign, and it was really orange today. There are so many levels of Clinton hatred delusion that it’s a challenge to figure out which tin foil hat to rip off first, and though it pains me to even mention it, there is a worst of the worst, and that is the hit squad theory. Some people’s hatred of the Clintons is white hot, like a blast furnace melting a cauldron of steel, and their eagerness to indict and impugn them is such that their normal adult discrimination escapes them, and otherwise thinking people endorse the claim that a trail of murders follows the Clinton legacy. If you’re in that camp, you’re around the bend as far my ability to reach you is concerned, and I don’t respect your mind.

The accusation that she is in deep collusion with Wall Street interests, however, earns every inch of the scrutiny it is getting. But the way I am looking at this issue is that the only way to lessen corporate influence in the American electorate over the course of the next ten years must begin with the repeal of Citizen’s United. Under the coming presidency, certainly two and most likely three justices will be appointed. I honestly doubt that Trump’s plan is to betray everyone he pandered to in the election and appoint liberal justices. He is the hero of the coal-rolling, Tweety Bird mudflap truck owner, and he’s going to give them the hanging judge their injured souls have been craving. Under a right wing reactionary Supreme Court, Citizen’s United is going nowhere, and that spells the end of campaign finance reform. Campaign finance was a disgrace before Citizen’s United. It has since become a travesty. Ipso facto, if reducing corporate influence in American elections is a priority, Clinton is the logical vote.

As to that corporate collusion, Bernie Sanders supporters, many of whom are young and perhaps even in their first political campaign, need to understand that they happen to have saddled the unicorn. Sanders is the one politician in modern times who has mounted a credible national campaign without relying on corporate donors. It’s astonishing. He is not one of a rare few, he is alone in this regard. The one. The mack Daddy. You know, the Daddy mack. The GOAT. Hopefully not unrepeatable, but at this juncture, the Sanders campaign was unique. A few wealthy corporate donors finance the rest of the political landscape in large measure, and for some candidates in near entirety. With Republicans, that is a natural fit. Big pharmaceutical, big insurance, big oil, big finance and weapons manufacturers are all looking for tax and regulation easements, and the Randian objectivism that for whatever reason also resonates with lower and middle class Republicans holds sacred those same ideals of unfettered capitalism.

Well, those same corporations fund the elections of Democrats as well, who have a much tougher sell to these corporations with their message. The Democratic Party only exists in modern America because of women, minorities, young people, labor and college-educated people. The general drift of all of these demographics is for taxation equity and social justice, which is a terrible fit for corporations. So for a Democratic Party leader to run against heavily funded Republicans requires some concessions, especially in the biggest of the big leagues. This essay is long and tedious enough without a litany of these Faustian bargains, but I have been watching this woman pretty closely for twenty-five years of my life, and when she makes a deal, it doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t come cheap. My democratic ideals are on balance well-represented with Hillary Clinton, and if you look at her senate voting record, it doesn’t differ in the main from that of Bernie Sanders.

It is easy to go down the rabbit hole of sketchy conspiracy theories and read a ration of garbage on Hillary Clinton. I've read a pretty fair amount of it, and I remain unconvinced of what seems to be a prevalent narrative that she is in any way driven by forces that are pernicious to this country. She is a real patriot and has undergone more scrutiny than a lone porno magazine making its way around a scout jamboree, and unlike the magazine, betraying no evidence of wrongdoing.

From a practical perspective, the presidency is much like any hiring situation. You hire the smartest, most experienced, most aptly tempered individual that is available for the job. There are two candidates. We are not so much electing a president as we are hiring one. So, what do you think? Should we hire a tough old lady who knows her way around Washington to watch our money or an egomaniacal racist nutbag who has never held public office? Hillary Clinton has a deeper contact list than anyone in the world, and quality working relationships with most of its leaders. She is highly respected across the globe and is seen as a steady hand on the rudder, a stabilizing force in a very tricky world. She is tough, smart, hardworking, fair-minded, sensible and liberal, and I will take that in my president, proudly.

The Dallas Shooting: The Worst of a Kind

America finds its new worst thing every once in a while, or at least an event that is the worst in a new way. Maybe Sandy Hook was the worst overall. Or Oklahoma City. Children. Anytime it’s children it’s the worst, a statement that itself reveals there no longer to be any such thing in America as the single worst. But this shooting of a dozen police officers maintaining order at a large street protest is the worst in its way. Its timing, its disinformed intent, its gruesome expression, its disrespect for the first amendment and its five times fatal result all thrust the Dallas shooting into the pantheon of the other great American worsts.

The most important aspect of this story is one that few of us are going to be much help on, and that is the individual stories of grief that now accompany each of these five destroyed lives. They involve wives, children, parents, friends and colleagues. They involve countless lessons that will remain forever untaught, countless people who will be loved that much less, and dozens of individuals who will suddenly be tasked with starting over. These massive and eternal rips in so many family portraits and the wounded officers who will be rising from their hospital beds with some combination of rage, survivor’s guilt and PTSD, are ongoing tragedies that will continue their ripple effects for decades and apart from those flaccid old standbys, thoughts and prayers, there’s not much an average citizen can do to effect easement in any tangible way to the souls who are standing at the epicenter of these tragedies.

I was feeling some movement on the issue that sparked the murderous assault. Slow, incremental, inadequate, yes, but movement. It is reflected in Newt Gingrich’s heavily covered utterance yesterday that he had come to believe that being black in America presented a sense of being at an inherent risk because of the color of one’s skin. Within vast swaths of the American population there has existed a delusion something akin to, “We cut them loose in 1863 and we've hardly bothered them since then.” But you can’t be taken seriously anymore if you’re trying to pretend there doesn’t exist a schism in American policing. Anecdotal and statistical evidence supports that there is, and if you are white and you’ve walked the other side of the street in segregated America for whatever reason, you’ve seen it and felt it as well.

If my hopefulness for what I perceived as the early stages of a national conversation moving in the right direction was another of my Pollyanna fantasies, then this assassination of five and wounding of seven men working the job of keeping the shooter’s city safe derailed nothing. But if there was movement, I think it’s hobbled that movement for now, and because one misguided soul decided to speak for millions of Americans who shared his frustration but not his madness, the momentum for improving racial parity in police encounters has been lost, perhaps for a long time. 

God, Guns and Gays, a Collision in Orlando

The amount of pandering to religious zeal varies according to political expediency and the nuisance level of the complainers. On the gay rights issue there are enough votes to be won in the central and southern states by condoning homophobia for it to be exploited by t-partyish American politicians; Kim Davis is your f’rinstance there. Huckabee was well aware of Kim Davis’s use-by date and he milked it until its expiration. The last thing he said to her was, “Lose my number.”

So you can still make a little hay by persecuting gays in America, but cake by cake, license by license, soldier by soldier, the majority has come to welcome and celebrate the LGBT component of their workplaces,  their social scenes and their families.

In the rest of America we pretty much all have gay friends or family members at this point so it has become less practical for politicians and government officials to gave a wink and a nod to sub rosa gay persecution, especially in large cities, which has in turn made more gay men and women comfortable coming out of the closet and integrating into a diverse and functioning democratic society. That cow is out of the barn and closeted homosexuality, once the norm, is now largely a relic of an ignorant past. It is difficult to imagine even small American cities not having open, thriving gay social scene.

That's a bad mix with the Islamic form of zealotry. A scene that could eventually birth a gay bar could never exist under Islam, so someone becoming an Islamic zealot in America is going to have a dissonance with homosexual acceptance in society. Islamic zealotry is about as vile as it gets. It is Christian zealotry’s ugly cousin. It has all of the smug superiority of its Christian counterpart but with a small-minded, thuggish vocabulary of expression that now includes suicide vests, high-capacity semi-automatic rifles and car bombs. 

Christian zealotry has a different cut to its jib. It thinks big when it objects to a particular sexuality. It stalls AIDS research. It humiliates entire classes of people over bathrooms. It seeks to destroy psychology and inflict shame. Muslim zealots don’t do the vision thing. Instead they reach for the largest scope of terror their pathetic imaginations can devise that day and take it as far as they can take it. In this case it was shooting up the gay bar.

Three worlds collided in Orlando. America's phlegmatic though palpable easement of morays pertaining to sexual orientation, the NRA’s lock on Congress, and religious fundamentalism. Facts continue to be revealed about the case, but the moral of the story fits both the Koran and the Bible, and indeed, numerous Christian pastors and Dan Patrick, Texas’ Lieutenant Governor, have already given the mass murderer their pats on the back, thumbs up and atta boys.

The murderer believes mankind's godlessness to be the problem. I and millions like me believe mankind's vision of God to be the problem. What that means is, we have a real problem.