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ieltscoachinginlaxminagar · 11 months

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Is the IELTS exam very difficult?

Here are some important tips given by Cambridge English Academy (CEA) India the Best IELTS Coaching In Laxmi Nagar

Introduction

No matter what your level of English is, the IELTS exam can be daunting. There is so much pressure to perform well and get a high score, especially if your future depends on it. So, is the IELTS exam really as difficult as everyone makes it out to be? Let's take a closer look at the components of the exam and find out.

What is the IELTS Exam?

IELTS, the International English Language Testing System, is designed to assess the language ability of candidates who need to study or work where English is used as the language of communication. IELTS is required for entry to universities in the UK and other countries.

The test has four components – Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking. The Speaking test is a face-to-face interview with a certified examiner. The other three tests are taken in the form of a multiple-choice test.

IELTS results are reported on a nine-band scale, from Band 1 (non-user) to Band 9 (expert user). Candidates are graded according to their performance across all four skills – Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking.

Band score 8 corresponds to an "expert user" of the language, who is able to communicate effectively on a range of topics. Band score 7 corresponds to a "good user" who can communicate satisfactorily on most topics.

The Different Sections of the IELTS Exam

The IELTS exam is divided into four sections: Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking.

Listening: In the listening section, you will be given a chance to listen to a conversation or a lecture and then answer questions based on what you heard.

Reading: For the reading section, you will be asked to read passages and answer questions about them. The passages can be from books, magazines, newspapers, or online sources.

Writing: In the writing section, you will be asked to write an essay in response to a prompt. You will also be given a task to complete in order to show your ability to write in a specific genre.

Speaking: Lastly, in the speaking section, you will be interviewed by an examiner. The examiner will ask you questions about yourself and give you topics to speak about.

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IELTS Exam Format

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam is used to assess the language abilities of people who want to study or work in an English-speaking environment. IELTS tests four skills: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. The IELTS test format is designed to be as fair as possible to all test takers, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, or first language.

Each skill is tested separately and the test takers receive a score from 1-9 for each skill. The total score is then converted to a band score from 1-9. Band 9 is the highest level and represents native-level English proficiency.

Here is a breakdown of the IELTS exam format:

Listening: Test takers listen to four audio recordings and answer 40 questions. The recordings are different types of speech, such as lectures, speeches, and conversations.

Reading: Test takers read three passages and answer 40 questions. The passages are taken from books, magazines, newspapers, or other sources.

Writing: Test takers write two essays, one on a given topic and one on a topic of their choice. They also have to complete a task where they summarize information from a graph or table.

Speaking: Test takers speak for about 15 minutes in total on three different topics. They also complete a short task where they have to describe an image.

IELTS Exam Preparation

The IELTS exam is not difficult if you are prepared for it. There are a few things you can do to make sure you are ready for the exam:

1. Familiarize yourself with the format of the exam. The IELTS test has four sections - listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Each section tests your skills in a different area. Make sure you know what to expect in each section so that you can be prepared.

2. Practice, practice, practice! The more you practice, the better you will do on the exam. There are many resources available to help you prepare for the IELTS test, including practice tests and sample questions. Take advantage of these resources to familiarize yourself with the material and improve your skills.

3. Be confident on test day. If you have done your preparation and practiced enough, you will be confident on test day and able to do your best. Relax and take your time during the exam so that you can show off your skills properly.

IELTS Scores

To get a high score on the IELTS exam, you will need to put in a lot of hard work and dedication. The IELTS is not an easy exam, but it is certainly possible to get a high score if you are prepared to study hard. There are a few things that you can do to help ensure that you get a high score on the IELTS exam.

First, make sure that you understand the format of the IELTS exam. The IELTS is divided into four sections: Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking. Each section has its own set of rules and regulations. Make sure that you are familiar with the format of each section before you begin studying for the IELTS.

Second, find good resources to help you study for the IELTS. There are many books and websites that offer tips and advice for getting a high score on the IELTS exam. Find resources that are specifically designed to help people prepare for the IELTS exam.

Third, make a study schedule and stick to it. It is important to create a study schedule that fits your lifestyle and commitments. Make sure that you allow enough time for each section of the IELTS exam. Do not try to cram everything into one week; instead, spread out your studying over several weeks or even months. This will give you time to really master the material covered in each section of the IELTS exam.

Conclusion

IELTS is a difficult exam, but it is not impossible to pass. If you are willing to put in the time and effort, you can definitely improve your score. There are also many resources available to help you prepare for the exam, so make sure to take advantage of them. With some hard work and dedication, you can achieve the score you need to reach your goals.

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kissmyessayorg-blog · 6 years

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writeondeadlinesc-blog · 6 years

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The best english essay writing service- Write On Deadline

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brainfull-nothoughts · 4 years

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Other student: " When I had to write this essay I ended up writting for 5 hours and didn't realise. Like, I was just so focused on the essay that I forgot everything else. That's crazy."

Me *in my customer service voice*: "Hi and welcome to hyperfocus"

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grandminers · 3 years

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Writing an essay is a burden to bear for every high school, college and university student. That is why the chances are you`ll most probably have to deal with this task on your own. There are many types of essays. For instance, argumentative, expository, persuasive and more. In this plethora of essays, one of the most interesting is a narrative one. In this article, you`ll learn what it takes to create an A grade narrative essay outline in the easiest way ever. So keep reading to be in the loop of academic writing tips and the things you are about to discover now will come in handy later. Maybe tomorrow.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What you need to know about a Narrative Essay

Why do you need an outline?

Killer technique to create an excellent Narrative Essay Outline

Top style recommendations to ensure great narrative essay outline:

What you need to know about a Narrative Essay

They say that you`ll be asked to conduct a narrative essay as a course assignment for English communication class and college admissions. Thuswise, it`s really important to understand what exactly you will have to deal with.

Narrative essay mixes up storytelling and essay composing. This means that you`ll have to write a response to some prompt. The tricky thing about a narrative essay is that your answer has to depict a particular real-life story, to show your personal experience of something and, thus wise, explaining to the reader your values. This shows the things that shaped you as a person and gives a reader insider information about yourself (FYI it`s a vital factor to get enrolled in a college).

Composing a perfect narrative essay lies in the structure you are to follow. So when you are crafting a narrative essay, you`ll have to create a compelling introduction, support it with the story in the body of your text, and arrive at a conclusion, which will sum up the whole document.

Why do you need an outline?

Admit it. You have been advised several times to create an outline for your essay, but you never actually thought to do it. Yes, it`s hard to structure the pace of your thought. You are just doing research, and afterward, your creativity takes in. So you write it with no structure or planning at all. Do not say it`s not true.

However, you do need to create that goddamn outline. Why? Who`s doing drafts these days? All the smart people out there are already getting the A+ just because they`ve spent some time to design a decent outline. Moreover, only by studying material you are not able to create an impressive essay. You`ll need to see a broader picture to make your professor go WOW. Secondly, when you plan your paper, you`re setting the structure of your essay-to-be. Plus, you are to get engaged in choosing the right wording. And if you`re doing two processes at once, everything ends up in a mess. Multitasking in essay writing is a half the battle of its flop. All in all, planning is everything it takes to succeed in academic essay writing.

Killer technique to create an excellent Narrative Essay Outline

Ok, and now is the moment you all have been waiting for. Top tips to create a cool narrative essay outline are all here!

Your essay may have a tight deadline, especially if it`s for college admissions. So the best advice to beat the deadline and create a marvelous paper is to stop that crazy heartbeat, take a deep breath, sit comfortably, and focus on the task you have to complete. Your panic attacks will do no good.

All professional writers advise starting your paper with an introduction that will highlight main aspects of the story but will intrigue the reader. Your introductory part has one aim, that is, to make a reader want to keep learning the story you`re about to bring upon him or her.

Basically, any introduction consists of three elements.

The hook. That`s the first sentence of your story, and this is the part where you can tell some fact, or describe your feelings in order to captivate the attention of the reader. It`s better to choose an experience that influenced your future decisions or was extremely dangerous/ funny/ poignant.

Setting the scene. This enables your target audience to visualize the situation clearly. Let the reader know when and where the action takes place. Provide general info.

Conduct a thesis statement. Understand the problem or the situation you want to show. Try to remember what you were feeling at that moment. Here you can tell a lesson learned, a theme you`ll be speaking about or write something like, «This was a usual day when I had breakfast and made ordinary decisions about places to visit, but it all ended up differently.» Remember what happened, pick the essential things from your plot and attack your readers will all these, so they will have no chances to put your papers down.

On the other hand, you may have a topic or prompt to write about or respond to. Here you`ll have various options to choose from. For some students, it makes the task harder, for others it works vice versa. Do not get distracted by the choice you have. Pick the topic, which is the most appealing to you.

Think about each theme carefully, note down the things you can say about every prompt. What incidents are stuck in your mind? What experience can you tell about in great detail? Such list of ideas to write about will help you see what subject you are the most passionate about. Review all your thoughts and select the one and only topic.

When you`re choosing to write about a prompt you feel emotional about, your writing style becomes more captivating and animated. Remember a situation in your life when you`ve felt or experienced something similar to the topic of the text and start working with this prompt.

You can also get a few topic ideas for your narrative essay here.

Now that you are done with the introduction, you can get going and move on to the main body. This is the part where you tell your experience or provide few stories that depict (support) the main idea of your text.

Your main body consists of several paragraphs. Bear in mind that each paragraph is the continuation of the previous one, so make sure you use transition sentences that transform all the sections into one complete story. Such transition sentences can appear either at the beginning of a new paragraph with the references to the prior sentences or at the end of the previous paragraph to introduce the next one.

Top style recommendations to ensure great narrative essay outline:

“Show, don’t tell”. Use descriptions that will construct the picture of your story in the head of a reader. The more descriptions, and emotive words, the better.

Avoid using clichéd phrases, or direct and dry statements. Show the story in bright colors, make a lively atmosphere, and add actual phrases from your past.

Make sure your text has a climax when the primary problem of the story is resolved.

Do whatever it takes to make a reader emphasize your characters, get engaged in the storyline.

Remember that the sequence of events in your plot has to be sequential and make sense. You don`t want to confuse your target audience with inconsistent actions that lead nowhere.

Make the ending clear. Even if it`s not a happy ending, your readers have to know how the story finished.

And the final part of your narrative essay is the conclusion that in the majority of cases sums up everything from the main body. Here you tell a reader how you benefited from the things that happened to you. Do you want to change your past? Would you act in another way if you could relive the situation one more time? It`s essential to clarify the lessons learned from your past and make them clear to the reader.

Highlight the moral of the story, analyze, and reflect the importance of such experiences for yourself.

Do not forget to check your essay once it seems to be finished. Make sure there are no grammar, stylistic, spelling or any other errors. Scan your papers on plagiarism, if you have this opportunity. Ensure the retrospective is understandable for the reader and check if there are too many «I» and «my» in the text. You do not want to seem intrusive.

Conclusion:

So folks, now you have all the instruments to create a compelling, intriguing and original narrative essay outline. The only thing left is actually to sit and start crafting it. Come on. Maybe there is a Stephen King or Emily Bronte inside you. Let`s find it out!

https://grademiners.com/blog/how-to-write-a-great-narrative-essay-outline

#essay writting services

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expertacademicassignmenthelp · 5 months

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How To Select The Appropriate Editor For The Dissertation ?

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theteablogger · 6 years

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Andy writ large

Several people have sent me links to the New Yorker article in which Ian Parker exposes author/editor Dan Mallory as having lied, gaslighted people, and engaged in other manipulative behaviors for many years in order to further his career. When confronted, Mallory tried to blame it all on mental illness. Anons have been discussing this on tf-talk and FFA, noting that Mallory sounds a lot like "the prestige drama version of Thanfiction", and I have to agree. I've written several times in the past about people who reminded me and others of Andy (Aiden Sinclair/Richard Outhier, Travis Aaron Wade, Kevin Spacey, Teri Hoffman and Tyler Deaton), and the similarities in this case are even more striking than any of those. So here are the things that stood out to me in Parker's article. This is a pretty long list, so I've broken it down into several sections for readability.

Generally manipulative behavior:

Tom Scott described Mallory, at their first meeting, as being self-assured and nonchalant in a way that (to me, as a reader) seemed studied. He also said that Mallory casually bragged about his success in a way that left him feeling charmed rather than nonplussed or annoyed. This matches up with several accounts I've read of people’s first impressions of Andy when he was in the LotR fandom.

Both Andy and Dan Mallory tend to get personal with strangers quickly and to overshare – e.g., the "lighthearted debate" at a festival in which Mallory abruptly got serious and spoke frankly (lying) about his alleged history of ECT. This kind of oversharing tends to elicit sympathy from listeners and to make them feel that this person is being genuine and vulnerable with them, which makes them more inclined to open up in turn. This is something that Andy was doing as recently as last year, but he misjudged his audience some of the time and they just found it off-putting.

They frequently engage in self-deprecating humor, which is endearing and encourages others to let down their guard. These days, Andy incorporates glib, jokey references to his past into this part of his shtick (e.g., "someday over a glass of wine, I'll tell you about the time I accidentally started a hobbit cult"), so it also serves to inoculate listeners against anything negative they might hear about him from other people.

Both tend to zero in on and exploit good-natured people who give others the benefit of the doubt.

Both pride themselves on (and brag about) using charisma and "wit" to talk their way into places/situations for which they are underqualified, that they can't afford, etc. See Andy’s remarks about getting "gorgeous service" at high-end boutiques based on charisma alone, and the commencement speech in which Mallory bragged about talking his way into a thesis program without doing the qualifying work.

These men hate to be in anything that could be construed as a subordinate role, although this is one area in which Andy is arguably more subtle than Dan Mallory.

Both enjoy hiding in plain sight—in Mallory’s case, through his novel.

Both have long histories of engaging in gaslighting, lying, and manipulation for their own benefit and/or entertainment.

Acquaintances have described both men's behavior as performative and calculating.

Neither could let go of their former victims, but instead kept contacting them to try and draw them back in—Andy did this with Abbey after she left him in Virginia, and Mallory did this with his former colleagues in London.

Lying liars who lie:

Both men have lied repeatedly and extensively about their physical and mental health histories, and can't be bothered to keep their stories straight. In Andy’s case, this has included claiming various psychiatric diagnoses with symptoms corresponding to their Hollywood portrayals, telling stories about allergic reactions and injuries that were wildly exaggerated at best, and more. Mallory told ever-changing stories of psychiatric treatments that worked either very well or not at all, blamed his chronic lying on Bipolar II (a claim that would be ludicrous if it weren't so offensive), repeatedly claimed to have brain tumors and/or cancer, and told a variety of lies over the years about family members' illnesses and deaths that never happened.

Both have lied about having mysterious, incurable ailments that would definitely kill them within a set number of years—which was prone to change—but that conveniently didn't stop Mallory from working when he felt like it, or Andy from traveling anywhere his friends would pay for.

Each of them has told a multitude of easily disprovable lies about his education, his family, and his personal history.

Both claimed to have been abused as children, though Andy told long, graphically detailed stories about it and Mallory doesn’t seem to have gone further than making an implication.

Each has lied about a younger sibling's identity: Mallory impersonated his brother in a long series of emails to former colleagues about his alleged ill health, and Andy told his friends that his sister was responsible for everything he'd done to people as Amy Player.

Both have inadvertently revealed themselves via verbal, syntactical, or spelling idiosyncrasies when impersonating others online.

Both impersonated other people to chronicle their fake or severely exaggerated illnesses and to describe their plucky/humorous behavior during alleged hospital stays.

Both faked accents—Andy was "Irish" and Mallory was "British".

Both have claimed, directly and by implication, to have connections and insider knowledge of Hollywood, the film industry, and/or screenwriting.

Aside from all the outright lies they've told, both men have engaged in lies of omission, deliberately not correcting others' misunderstandings or misperceptions about them.

When their lies were exposed, both claimed that their accusers were lying because they were sexually attracted to them and had either been rejected (as Mallory said of the CEO of a publishing house), or were disturbed by the attraction (as Andy said of Turimel).

Both tend to double down when confronted about an obvious lie, and then try to steer the conversation to other topics.

Miscellany:

Each is the eldest son of affluent parents.

Mallory's fascination with Tom Ripley is reminiscent of Andy's admiration of Frank Abagnale.

Both were involved in their college theatre departments. For Andy, this is true of his attendance at VCU, at Thomas Nelson Community College, and at Christopher Newport University almost twenty years ago. (I’m not sure what he did at George Mason. He wasn't there for long.)

The work of both men is, shall we say, "derivative". In Andy's case, this applies more to his art. I am not familiar with Mallory's work other than The Woman in the Window and a handful of quotations from essays and e-mails he's written, but it appears that in TWW, he may have ripped off a novel by Sarah A. Denzil that was published six months before he started trying to sell his book, and has almost certainly ripped off "Copycat", a movie from 1995 (see New Yorker article).

Mallory’s focus on process and strategy in writing, the way his own voice overwhelms that of the narrator, and Parker's description of TWW as "a thriller excited about getting away with writing a thriller" all reminded me of the experience of reading DAYD and the way Andy has often talked about writing and storycraft.

Many former associates of each man were at least somewhat aware of how sketchy they were, but were unable or unwilling to call them out.

A surprising number of people, despite knowing they've been lied to repeatedly and at great length, still like both of them quite a lot.

Both Andy's and Dan Mallory's parents seem like kind, decent people who love their sons and want to believe the best of them.

Specific lines from the "New Yorker" article that made me think of Andy:

A former colleague on Mallory: "'If there was something that he wanted and there was a way he could position himself to get it, he would. If there was a story to tell that would help him, he would tell it.'"

"He’d begin with rapturous flattery…and then shift to self-regard. He wittily skewered acquaintances and seemed always conscious of his physical allure."

Author Sophie Hannah: "Mallory 'renewed my creative energy,' she said. He had a knack for 'giving feedback in the form of praise for exactly the things I’m proud of.'"

"Speaking in Colorado last January, Mallory quoted a passage from Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir, 'An Unquiet Mind,' in which she describes repeatedly confronting the social wreckage caused by her bipolar episodes—knowing that she had 'apologies to make.' … In more recent public appearances, Mallory seems to have dropped this reference to wreckage. Instead, he has accepted credit for his courage in bringing up his mental suffering, and he has foregrounded his virtues."

Mallory: "It's been horrific, not least because, in my distress, I did or said or believed things I would never ordinarily say, or do, or believe—things of which, in many instances, I have absolutely no recollection."

#andrewmblake #andythanfiction #thanfiction #dan mallory #andy blake #andrew blake #hiding in plain sight #mental health

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anna-azizah-blog · 5 years

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Compare and contras essay

waitress and a flight attendant

There are many works that human can do . Job is really important because it shows the status of social of human. We can see the status from the money or what is the job of people. Instead of that, there are two jobs that have same purpose, but have different status in people environment. There are waitress and flight attendant. That job have some similarities and differences, instead of have same purpose.

They all wearing uniform with simple makeup and both provide service to customers. Their work is to service the costumer with very pleasant. For them, being a good service is number one to make the customers happy. They usually bring some foods or drink that the customers or passenger order. This job require of good attitude and good looking.

However, responsibility to the customers ,qualifications of the job, and salary and employee benefits are completely different than other. One differences is their responsibility to the customers. Memorized the menu, give a brief introduction, take the order,and hand the food are the jobs for waitress. In contrast, a flight attendant has more responsibility than a waitress. Although they also serve drinks and food to passengers, they focus on customer’s safety instead of service. They need various training to deal with the emergencies.

Another noticeable difference between a waitress and a flight attendant is the qualifications of the job. Being a waitress only requires good personality and a service mind. In contrast, working as a flight attendant is much more difficult than a waitress. Because they need to accommodate passengers from different countries, language is the most demanded. Also, Height is also required because they need to load baggage and reach safety equipments. The last major difference is salary and employee benefits.

waitress is not the best career to choose because their salary is unsteady and their benefits from company is far lesser than flight attendant. As a flight attendant, their salary is steady and higher than waitress’s. Moreover, Flight attendant’s benefits are much better than waitress’s. Flight attendant's parents and sibling can get ninety percent off discount for tickets,whereas a waitress only can get little discount or not in their working place.

Paragraph writting

@rifkiok

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poc-in-science · 6 years

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“Meaning is still measured from below”: on 2014 MU69

by Divya M. Persaud

Let’s talk about Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) 2014 MU69, nicknamed “Ultima Thule” for the time being before the IAU makes a final decision on its name. Last March, Meghan Bartels wrote a piece for Newsweek discussing the origins of this term; the article was widely circulated the night of the flyby, prompting quite a lot of discussing within and without the space community. The mission team subsequently defended this discussion, calling it a “wonderful name for exploration.”

A lot of people are wondering: why does it matter? Can we not ascribe something positive and new to this term? Or else, can’t we just bypass that meaning and continue to refer to the original, Norse concept? I want to discuss a few things: how what we do in space always will reflect society and culture, as well as influence society and culture—and the role of iconography, including neo/fascist iconography, in this process. This piece is not meant to be comprehensive (I am still learning!) but to outline some of these issues and point to other resources on these subjects.

A PDF version of this essay is available here.

We in space science often frame space as a completely unmarked expanse—a place of renewal, separate from the worries of this planet, and merely interpreted through objective investigation. But the expanse is where social conditions, structures, and processes are writ large, and possibly so clearly and obviously because it is such an immense (literally spatial, and also imaginative) canvas for dreams and scientific inquiry, and also because it is such a mighty endeavor to study at all, necessitating human cooperation and technological development.

We can understand this process of ‘mapping’ society unto space by looking at the concept of Western modernism and objectivity. Maria Lugones describes a linear progress in history as a concept produced within the “cognitive need” of capitalism to “natural[ize]” coloniality:

“Europe was mythologically understood to pre-exist this pattern of power as a world capitalist center that colonized the rest of the world and as such the most advanced moment in the linear, unidirectional, continuous path of the species. A conception of humanity was consolidated according to which the world's population was differentiated in two groups: superior and inferior, rational and irrational, primitive and civilized, traditional and modern” (Lugones 2008).

European colonialism thus requires the positioning of Europe as the arbiter of progress and modernity, rendering the frontier always in opposition. Of this linear progress, Peter Redfield writes that “just as European history naturally defines the categories of modernity by virtue of precedence, outer space naturally defines the globe by virtue of bounding it...” (Redfield 2002).

In another essay, Redfield argues that the “unknown” requires knowing—our social conditioning permits us to understand the unknown, and that conditioning isn’t neutral:

“Placeless space is not free from culture or social norms, even if blurs location...it depends on mastery of a set of cultural & social codes that allow for the possibility of universalized, mobile experience - the recognition of things one has never specifically seen before” (Redfield 1996).

The question of space thus becomes one of opposition: it is, in a sense, an Other in relation to Earth, but also, more specifically, an Other that inherits our social structures (including our colonial history). This is a settler colonial model of space that directly relates to settler colonialism on Earth. In Spaceflight, Culture, and Ideology, Linda Billings incisively writes:

“Patricia Nelson Limerick has pointed out that space advocates cling to the frontier metaphor, conceiving ‘American history [as] a straight line, a vector of inevitability and manifest destiny linking the westward expansion of Anglo-Americans directly to the exploration and colonization of space’…advocates of U.S. spaceflight have created their own frontier mythology, as Limerick has noted, expanding the story of Western American settlement to encompass space exploration” (Billings 2007).

And Redfield identifies this frontier mythology as one of settler colonialism:

“the history of space representation is full of visions of settler colonization. This point is not surprising, given the narrative topology of any act of leaving the earth or extending human life through the galaxy, but it has effects when placed next to the fissures of terrestrial history. Even the planners of the German V-2 dreamed beyond their engines of destruction, imagining an era of peaceful exploration, while American and Soviet cold warriors alternated geopolitical fears of final conflict with calls to embrace a new dawn for humanity. Amid explicitly imperial tropes of representation, space offered the prospect of a renewed form of settlement, this time into a zone safely free from human difference” (Redfield 2002).

What strikes me about this passage is the argument that space itself has been framed as a place “free from human difference.” As a planetary scientist, I often hear that space is an opportunity for unprecedented international cooperation, a project for humanity that can serve peace and renewal on Earth. This is a wonderful project and dream, and one that I try to integrate into my own practice as a researcher. But this kind of claim isn’t neutral or without precedent in, e.g., the Manifest Destiny. Alice Gorman succinctly writes:

“The development of space industry is embedded in colonial history and economic relationships. From a colonial perspective, both interplanetary space and the lands of ‘primitive’ people are terra nullius, empty wildernesses, or moral vacuums, into which civilized sea-faring or space-faring nations can bring the right moral order. The colonial aspects of space exploration are a mirror of those same aspirations played out on Earth” (Gorman 2005).

So fervor isn’t isolated to individuals, but relates to an ideology behind the way space exploration functions (e.g. funding, public engagement, and how “discoveries” are framed). Billings relates the cultural rhetoric she describes to an ideology in space exploration, not just an isolated cultural interpretation by “advocates”:

“This rhetoric conveys an ideology of spaceflight that could be described, at its worst, as a sort of space fundamentalism: an exclusive belief system that rejects as unenlightened those who do not advocate the colonization, exploitation, and development of space.”

Enlightenment, in this case, thus comes to mean uncritical support of expanse into the “frontier” of space—rendering not the non-inhabitants of space as “inferior…irrational…primitive…traditional,” not just Earth/Space the here/there, but also critics. Our concepts of coloniality—of the Other, of “exploring” an “unknown”—and our own material history absolutely inform the ways we frame and carry out space exploration, and also the extent to which we are allowed to critique it. Any woman scientist who has publicly reacted to a case of racism, sexism, etc. on Twitter understands this, but there’s also something to be said about France’s reclamation of land in French Guiana for its launch services (I point to Redfield’s pieces as critical literature on this history), as well as White Sands in the United States, Woomera in Australia (Gormon expands on this) and launch sites in Algeria.

In a report on a 2009 NASA climate change workshop called “Native Peoples – Native Homelands,” the authors included a special note regarding LCROSS, which they framed as a bombing of the Moon, and critically ask, “The Moon has rights and does not belong to the US – who determines the right for countries to carry out activities on the Moon?” (Maynard 2009). Meanwhile, the “frontier” concept of a blank landscape has been historically applied to lands occupied for launches to space: “A number of factors made Woomera a good choice for a rocket range in 1947. Not least among them was the perception of the area as remote, arid and devoid of people” (Gorman 2005). This is a direct relationship between Indigenous people and their rights, settler colonialism, and colonial entitlement to physical space on Earth to reach outer space.

Redfield thus ominously writes, similarly to Gorman:

“Whatever happened to empire in the 2nd half of the 20th century, it did not simply vanish...it lingers on, even beyond the planet, amid the faint beckoning glow of the stars. To move out invites...a passage forward through the very pasts we might think we are leaving behind (Redfield 2002).”

Lucianne Walkowicz wrote a fantastic article on the Space Force, and very pointedly says:

“the idea of a border enclosed not only from all sides, but from above; the suggestion of military expansion, not merely into other countries, but with such sweep as to reach entirely beyond our planet; and the proffered trade of commercial success for silence and complicity.”

This is the ideology that Billings discusses, and the mapping of our colonial history unto the stars—space isn’t something we conceptualize in a vacuum, and isn’t something we explore beyond material history or without ideology.

Many argue that there are no people in space, or on Mars, to colonize—so why does it matter? The introduction of NASA’s “Critical Issues in Spaceflight,” the authors write that “Most strikingly, at least so far, and perhaps happily, since such encounters in the past have left more than one civilization decimated, explorers of the Space Age have not had to worry about encounters with indigenous inhabitants of the lands they explore” (Dick and Launius 2006). Even if we somehow ignore the neocolonialism of space bases, as Walkowicz says in an interview, “it erases the history of colonization here on our own planet.“ What we do out in space will always come back to reflect on us and impact real people on Earth.

In an interview about NatGeo’s very racist cover last November, John Edwin Mason says:

“The cover photo also reminds me of the iconography of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa. The man on a horse, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and commanding the landscape, was a recurring motif in Afrikaner nationalist imagery. As in the US, it grew out of a desire to naturalize and justify settler colonialism and the theft of lands owned by indigenous people.”

Symbolism, as part of culture, thus has a significant weight. We have to interrogate symbols, iconography, and historic connotations in any and all fields of science (if we truly purport to be critical as a collection of fields). “Settlers,” “colonization/colonies,” and “resource extraction” are real terms sweepingly used in my field to describe human and robotic exploration of the solar system. Even the word “exploration”—as opposed to investigation, study, etc.—alongside “pioneer,” “mariner,” “clipper” in mission names, bears a specific, heavy history that most of the world population directly relates to European colonialism. This NASA page really discusses Jamestown as a model for astronaut survival, posing the British invasion of North America as neutral, and has the audacity to discuss “Native American foods.”

There has been a more recent hash of conversations about colonial language around space exploration (I’m not going to link all of my many favorites because this essay is already getting quite long, but I have many saved here and I encourage you to read all of them). Meghan Bartels reports that:

“No matter how gently space programs are worded, by the numbers they’ve mostly benefited colonizers so far. Every one of the 12 humans to set foot on the Moon has been a white American man. Just one in 10 countries on Earth has sent an astronaut to the International Space Station, and only three countries in the entire southern hemisphere have been able to do so. The U.S. sent its first Native American astronaut to space in 2002. Those statistics and the loaded terminology we use to talk about space are two sides of the same coin.”

D.N. Lee writes about human exploration of Mars in a must-read:

“I worry that Mars exploration and colonization will be less about saving all of humanity and more about staking claims to profitable natural resources and establishing essential industries. After all, this kind of naked resource grab has happened before.”

As Dr. Lee mentions in her article, these sorts of critiques aren’t popular (and again, I cite the experiences of women scientists on Twitter as a taster), or else are wholeheartedly rejected with disingenuous arguments about moving “beyond” history. Lisa Messeri writes:

“During his talk he took the time to address those who would urge him to find new language. Following slides showing images of exploring and settling the American West…Tumlinson assured his audience that in drawing on the frontier metaphor, he is not condoning the destruction of Native American communities or the spread of small pox. If you ignore these bad historical associations, Tumlinson argued, you’re left with an otherwise compelling model of space settlement. As if one can take the good parts of a metaphor, setting the unseemly ones aside.”

(This is of course relevant to our current conversation on Ultima Thule, which I will discuss later.) The person she describes is Rick Tumlinson, a New Space advocate who, again, really truly wrote a “Manifesto for the Frontier” like it’s 1812 and we’re driving covered wagons (and by we, I don’t mean me at all). This is a real-life article on Space.com about how space will be like the “American West”. I’m often told that it’s the “old generation of white men” who cling to these ideals or make these excuses, but it’s not. Last year, 500 Women Scientists released an article in Scientific American, interestingly arguing:

“despite what some may say, scientific values are American values. Free speech and a free press allow us to speak truth even when it’s inconvenient to those in power, and to loudly disagree with each other in public. Science proceeds by the consensus of the many and is skeptical of unearned authority. And despite what some senior professors may believe, peer review tolerates no kings.”

with a hyperlink to an article about “anti-facts” ideology (a mythos I’ve written about elsewhere but won’t address here). I’m not going to expand on the alarmingly jingoistic tone of this piece, nor the aspects of propaganda in its narrative—I am made very uneasy by these claims that we have an operating free press in the U.S., or a right to free speech for all citizens who can “loudly disagree” without getting, e.g., arrested, in addition to the obvious elision of the sexism and racism in the peer review process and how that “consensus” is extremely colored by institutional oppressive structures, coming from an organization that claims to be far more critical than this—but rather wish to point to the relationship between nation, cultural symbols, and science as an endeavor broadly and space exploration specifically. The first Apollo moon landing is famous for inciting this conversation with the planting of the U.S. flag:

“Perhaps insignificant in themselves, the Tranquility Base artefacts represent one of the major motivations of the space race: to imprint a specific national, ideological and colonial meaning on the Moon” (Gorman 2005)

There’s a two-way exchange with the language and symbols we (literally) deploy—the ideology we invest in them, and the effects on culture they generate. We also need to look beyond these singular “moments” in space history, and more broadly to the concept of iconography. In Culture and Imperialism, Said writes:

“The processes of imperialism occurred beyond the level of economic laws and political decisions, and—by predisposition, by the authority of recognizable cultural formations, by continuing consolidation within education, literature, and the visual and musical arts—were manifested at another very significant level, that of the national culture, which we have tended to sanitize as a realm of unchanging intellectual monuments, free from worldly affiliations” (Said 1994).

This of course relates to the ideology that Billings describes, and the continuity between the terra nullius of the American West and outer space, but also relates to fascist iconography and how it is “sanitized” of its material history.

Nazis still exist—let’s be clear about this—and iconography has always had a role in fascism. Let’s look at art: art, as a communicative project, supplies us with a way to understand symbolism, iconography, and ideology. We can even understand the public engagement aspect of space missions—that is, the relationship between the scientific endeavor and the public through direct communication as well as information diffused through factual and nonfactual media—as a form of public art, replete with graphic design, a sort of internal poetics, and even song. Entire movements in art history—where literature, music, and visual art have overlapping movements and periods—served and still serve as propaganda for imperialism. Lighting, color, texture, movement, composition, and symbolism were and are traditionally used to cast scenes (and music, and literature) in racialized ways. Connotations of white supremacy are clear, once you understand motives that denote the Other (typically, Jewish people in Europe), e.g. 19th century paintings of Vikings or Greek gods, common symbols in European and especially German fascism.

These pieces of artwork served specific public tastes and were commissioned, literally or implicitly, by the colonial project. This is the process of racialization—an ongoing event of generating the Other in culture, and thus crystallizing ideology. Of architecture in Mussolini’s Italy, Stone writes:

“Three elements of the exhibition account for its reception: the iconographic and aesthetic; the national cultural; and the organizational. Examination of the mechanism of ’aesthetics’, ’national culture’ and ’mass culture’ reveals the ways in which fascism produced a propaganda exhibition that received critical and popular acclaim, while eliciting some of the consensus the regime sought” (Stone 1993).

That public taste was a goal for the fascist regime—it served a purpose as propaganda, an aesthetic tied to political ideology. Complacency and complicity become intertwined, here; Said writes of imperialist propaganda:

“There was a commitment…over and above profit, a commitment in constant circulation and recirculation, which, on the one hand, allowed decent men and women to accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated, and, on the other, replenished metropolitan energies so that these decent people could think of the imperium as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule subordinate, inferior, or less advanced peoples” (Said 1994).

These symbols, icons, and aesthetics are a bridge between regimes (whether fascist and/or imperialist) and the people to sustain the system. With respect to the Other, this means the construction and reconstruction of the Other in public opinion, the justification of the oppression of the Other, and complacency when the Other is targeted.

“Ultima Thule” is an aesthetic signifier entrenched, due to ideological processes in the history of Germany even prior to the formation of the Nazi party, in the Other, and which was part of the “mass culture.” The mythology wasn’t confined to basement meetings of the Thule Society, but served to generate the Jewish Other as a creation myth for “pure” Germans, one that entered German culture (Godwin 1996). Zernack writes about a publishing house that used the term:

“the name Thule stood for a Germanic continuity, promising something ancient and at the same time maintaining its unremitting validity, or, as announced in the publisher’s advertisement in its characteristic religious diction (1922): ‘Thule is not history; Thule is the eternal Germanic soul’” (Zernack 2011).

The name is, due to cultural process in history that had material consequences, tied to anti-Semitic white supremacy. That NASA (and ESA) draw aerospace engineering heritage from Nazi Germany doesn’t help its case. During WWII,

“1400 detainees from SS concentration camps to work on the V2 [rocket] assembly line…rockets were manufactured using the slave labour of Dora and other concentration camps…Wernher von Braun…visited concentration camps to select workers…Of 60,000 prisoners employed at Mittelbau, over 20,000 died of assault, starvation and sickness (Neufeld, 1996). A far greater number died in the manufacture of the V2 rockets than were killed in their deployment” (Gorman 2005).

SS officer Wernher von Braun would later serve as the director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and have an obscene number of roads, buildings, and awards named after him. One could argue that von Braun himself has entered the national culture, forgiven in explicit and yet many unspoken ways.

History alone should give us pause before reviving terminology whose application in the past two centuries has been the subjugation of Jewish people. But as I said, Nazis still exist, and this is a present issue, as well. France has a significant anti-Semitism problem and has seen increased fatal attacks against Jewish people in the past decade. Sweden and Germany have similar problems, and the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, in which eleven died, follows a long legacy of anti-Semitic hate crimes in America. Meanwhile, Charlottesville is only one example of recent neo-Nazi and neo-fascist rallies in the U.S. Neo-Nazis do not entertain a mere fascination with previous fascist movements, nor a fixation on their symbols, nor even simply a revival—they are, rather, a continuation of an ideology, and its tools. Cotter writes that “skinheads consider themselves the latest group of warriors to fight for the white race, comparing themselves to ancient Vikings and more recently Nazi storm troopers” (Cotter 1999, emphasis mine). We also have to interrogate the reporting of these crimes and rallies—lack of coverage, resistance to naming them hate crimes, and reluctance to connect neo-Nazis to an ideology that predates this century. What Billings writes of how critics are treated as oppositional to the project of space exploration takes on a new meaning when we consider anti-Semitic dog-whistles about “enemies” of nations.

The Washington Post has a very handy guide on the symbols from the rally in Charlottesville, including Norse symbols that harken to the ‘homeland’ of the mythical Aryan race. While the Anti-Defamation League warns that other groups tend to also use Norse symbols that are employed by white supremacists, a quick search supplies examples of neo-Nazi organizations using the name of “Thule.” One example is a press that distributed Nazi propaganda to white inmates; a member of the White Order of Thule was charged in the 90s for plotting to bomb Jewish and African American landmarks.

While Thule is perhaps less common than the symbolism of Thor’s hammer or runes, ‘neo-volkisch’ movements and certain Nordic neo-paganism still revolve around the Aryan ‘homeland’ and anti-Semitic, anti-Black race science. The symbol of a common homeland, not just ancestry, is essential to fascists, as is the continuity I describe:

“Right-wing extremists have long regarded themselves as protectors of the nation - a group of people that conceives itself to be distinct from others. This is based on both objective criteria - such as a shared history, connection to a territorial homeland, common language or religion…which has existed throughout the centuries by passing on the national group's traditions, myths of common ancestry, and cultural symbols from one generation to the next” (Cotter 1999).

This connection of geography to race science—a frontier, blank, white, pure—makes the usage of it to describe a distant planetary object very jarring. Also jarring is the very familiar response to accusations of the members of punk band Ultima Thule of fascist tendencies in the 90s:

“[Stockholm city councilmember] Carlberg's opinion of them did not change. He explained why he had found it so important to take them under his wing: ‘There is an extremely fertile soil for a newly awakened national sentiment, foremost among young people. Ultima Thule is the only band which expresses this feeling today. I want them to work towards a positive nationalism’” (Deland 1997).

While the responses to criticisms of MU69’s nickname haven’t typically cited “positive nationalism,” the stark jingoism of the New Horizons press coverage the morning of January 1 was hard to ignore. Twenty or so smiling, mostly white children waved flags and counted down to the timing of the flyby, and at the press release Alan Stern referred to New Horizons as an “American mission.” I blinked several times in both instances; there was no way for me to not physically react to this messaging. And the erasure of the power of history, combined with the nationalist flavor of media around this mission, is not new and that’s concerning.

So what does it mean that space is intended to be a “new dawn” but very obviously for the few (Redfield 2002)? Where planetary bodies are named not only as symbols of an ultimate, blank frontier, but also with connotations of the white race? How do the demographics of these space missions—and their optics, who’s in mission control, which children are made to represent the future of the field and the public at large—connect to this issue? Whose “new dawn” is it? Who in history has had the benefit of viewing land as property to be taken, terra nullius to be claimed for settlement, while framing any resulting harm as either necessary or imagined? Who in history is repeatedly placed at the margins and silenced, and villainized as enemies of the state? And how does it relate to the war profiteers with whom we collaborate—missile companies that bombed Syria less than a year ago; drone manufacturers that kill innocents in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; corporations that operate on stolen and occupied land? And, so, what is the role of space exploration in the ongoing construction of race and anti-Semitism?

Importantly, why is asking any of these questions—from the mere point of diversity, to workplace climate, to jingoist optics and messaging, to the funding of these missions—so sacrilege, so often met with propaganda, so threatening?

Ultimately, academic citations or language aren’t the point; it should be enough that people affected by neo-/Nazism are saying that this is unacceptable. That we face and witness rising neo-Nazism in the West (while these testimonies are typically silenced), and that to use Nazi-associated terminology is discomfiting. That the historic connection between space exploration, war and genocide, racism and anti-Semitism, is too much to ever consider this an isolated issue with no context.

“For all the dreams of the world’s space agencies, the mythic allusions in rocket and programme names, the indomitable enthusiasm of space aficionados, the multiple imagination of science fiction, and even the farce of the world’s first space tourist, human spaceflight has yet really to move beyond the earth. In the absence of the sure reflection of either a god or an alien above, meaning is still measured from below” (Redfield 2002).

References

Billings, Linda. 2007. “Overview: Ideology, Advocacy, and Spaceflight—Evolution of a Cultural Narrative.” In Societal Impact of Spaceflight, edited by Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Cotter, John M. 1999. “Sounds of Hate: White Power Rock and Roll and the Neo-Nazi Skinhead Subculture.” Terrorism and Political Violence, 11 (2): 111–40. doi:10.1080/09546559908427509.

Dick, Steven J., and Roger D. Launius, eds. 2006. Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Godwin, Joscelyn. 1996. Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival. Adventures Unlimited Press.

Gorman, Alice Claire. 2005. “The Cultural Landscape of Interplanetary Space.” Journal of Social Archaeology5 (85). doi:10.1177/1469605305050148.

Lugones, Maria. 2008. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise, 2 (2): 1–17. doi:10.1207/S15327949PAC0603_5.

Maynard, Nancy G, ed. 2009. “Native Peoples - Native Homelands Climate Change Workshop II.” In. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Redfield, Peter. 1996. “Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and Its Place on the Ground.” Science Technology and Human Values21 (3): 251–74. doi:10.1177/016224399602100301.

———. 2002. “The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space.” Social Studies of Science32 (5–6): 791–825. doi:10.1177/030631270203200508.

Said, Edward W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books.

Stone, Marla. 1993. “Staging Fascism: The Exhibition of the Fascist.” Journal of Contemporary History. 28: 215–43.

Zernack, Julia. 2011. “Old Norse – Icelandic Literature and German Culture The European Discovery of Old Norse Mythology.” In Iceland and Images of the North.

#space exploration #science and colonialism #original writing #mu69 #nazi tw -

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Year End 2018: Derek Taylor

Another year above ground. Another year salvaged in no small part through the solace of music. That may register as a Limbo-worthy low bar for measuring life satisfaction, not mention one hopelessly awash in hyperbole, but there’s a reason. The sobering sense of normalcy that’s come to characterize the daily insanity of the world writ large and small makes the railing and grousing about it through a laptop keyboard feel at once futile and arrogant. Many of us still have it pretty good, if not better. Able to move and think freely. Fortunate to readily find the time to spend sequestered with art, whatever the senses and thoughts it stimulates. Plenty of others can’t consistently say the same. That ever-widening disparity weighs on my mind with a regularity that makes the compiling and commentary of lists such as this seem both a luxury and a necessity. We’re all in it together and revitalizing music is as meaningful a reminder as any of that steadfast reality. If only the orange orangutan still soiling the Oval Office and the psyches of millions (if not billions) would swap the MAGA-emblazoned nonsense that’s his usual headgear for the Burnside brim pictured above and mean it!

No real ranking to the entries below other than the general order to which they visited me through contemplation and return engagement.

Eric Dolphy – Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Sessions (Resonance)

Released in haphazard, infrequent and incomplete editions, Eric Dolphy’s interstitial work (landing between his formative tenure at Prestige and his solitary masterpiece for Blue Note, Out to Lunch) under the aegis of producer Alan Douglas has never really received a fair shake from curators and critics alike. That long-standing slight was rectified this year with the Record Store Day release of Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Sessions on the Resonance label. Rescued, enhanced and appended with 85-minutes of previously unreleased music and a lavish 100-page book stocked with scholarly essays by the likes of flautists James Newton and Nicole Mitchell, Sonnys Rollins and Simmons, Han Bennink, Henry Threadgill, Oliver Lake and others it’s an unprecedented boon on all fronts. The CD version of the set is slated for a 1/25 street date.

Barre Phillips

Octogenarian expatriate bassist Barre Phillips has sustained a relatively steady output in the 21st century, but End To End, a solo set (his purported last) for ECM, and a Oh My, Those Boys!, a timely reissue of his extended duets with Japanese confrere Motoharu Yoshizawa on the Lithuanian No Business label are aural confirmation of his consistency across decades. Alone and self-limited to the length of a LP he sculpts a somber soliloquy of intimate communion with his instrument. In the fast company of Yoshizawa, who fields a custom-made electric upright, the mood is much more frenetic in playful. Both settings are aurally transfixing.

Mingus – Jazz in Detroit/Strata Concert Gallery/46 Selden

Weighing in at a mighty five-discs, Jazz in Detroit/Strata Concert Gallery46 Selden dispenses with Christian name specifics and allows surname to suffice in announcing its bigger-than-life subject. Mingus’ instrumental faculties weren’t quite as consistent as the virtuosic powers that propelled him in youth (he had just over six years to live in the winter of 1974 when this material was captured), but any effects of advancing age fall away when he calls a tune, soloing with strength and at length and according his auspicious sidemen including drummer Roy Brooks who is ostensibly responsible for the recording’s survival. Retooled staples like “Pithecanthropus Erectus” and “Peggy’s Blue Skylight” join newer improvisational springboards like “The Man Who Never Sleeps” and “Noddin’ Ya Head Blues” to form a veritable smorgasbord of vibrant small group, stage-born jazz.

Peter Brötzmann

The venerable German road dog always has a place on this list. Now somewhat miraculously pushing eighty he’s still at it, crisscrossing the globe and breaking hearty musical bread with friends old and new. Three releases stood out to these ears: two recent duos and a welcome reissue of Hot Lotta, one of his early free jazz missives recorded almost five decades earlier with faithful countryman Kowald and the Finnish duo of Juhani Aaltonen and Edward Vesala. In the must-hear duo column reside, Ouroboros, a 2011 German club date with Chicago cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm on Astral Spirits, and Sparrow Nights on Trost, a wrenchingly intimate studio encounter with pedal steel phantasmagorist Heather Leigh, who ranks easily among Brötzmann’s most intriguing recent coconspirators.

Corbett vs. Dempsey

Keeping the Corbett vs. Dempsey count to just three for the year is a tough task as their usual prolificacy combined with a commensurate excellence. The reissue of Steve Lacy’s seminal Stamps, originally released in 1979 as his debut for the Swiss Hat Hut imprint narrowly edges out the equally edifying appearance of Milford Graves long-lost Bäbi if only because my spouse allows me to spin the cacophonously calorific latter platter only in her conspicuous absence. A decade was a long time to wait for Joe McPhee and Hamid Drake’s duo follow-up, Keep Going, this time trading stage for studio. But from the music to the mantra-ready title it’s a welcome inoculation against the forces of idiocy and ire globally arrayed against those with humanist allegiances.

Guy Lafitte

Last year it was Lucky Thompson. This year French tenorist Guy Lafitte got the Fresh Sound archival treatment with four full discs of material from his heyday as one of his country’s most popular indigenous purveyors of jazz. Each set delves into a different side of his folio from tight ensembles to modestly-sized orchestras, sometimes in the company of visiting guests, but more often plying his sound amongst a core crew of fellow believers. One of former, Michel de Villers, also earned a survey with The Complete Small Group Sessions 1949-1956 that shows him living up to the sobriquet of “Low Reed” at length on deftly deployed baritone saxophone.

Steeplechase

The Danish Steeplechase label always seems to slot in my yearly look back, mainly because of the consistency of both their roster and long-standing aesthetic. Sea changing surprises instigated by their records are exceedingly rare, but the odds of a stimulating listen are conversely high with virtually every release. Guitarist Pierre Dørge’s Soundscapes convenes a quintet with tenorist Stephen Riley and cornetist Kirk Knuffke in the service of the leader’s customarily open-ended compositions. Riley’s Hold ‘Em Joe is at once a canted tribute to Sonny Rollins and a welcome return to the piano-less trio format he first cut his teeth on for the label a decade ago. Baritonist Gary Smulyan’s Alternative Contrafacts yields winsome results with the instrumentation as well in a creative nod to the sort of extrapolations that were the fertile province of the Tristano School in the last century.

No Business/Chap Chap

A partnership between the No Business label and the Korean Chap Chap imprint continues to yield impressive reissues. All in circulation to date are worthy of consideration, but two bent my ears with pleasing consistency. Kang Tae Hwan’s Live at Café Amores offers an extended concert for solo saxophone that is equal measures Zen meditation and extended techniques master-class. Choi Sun Bae Quartet’s Arirang Fantasy teams a trio of Korean improvisers with visiting Japanese bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa for another café set that is ripe with cross-cultural creativity. Lastly, a reissue of sorely unsung vibraphonist Bobby Naughton’s 1976 masterstroke The Haunt with Leo Smith and the recently-deceased Perry Robinson (R.I.P.) in a setting of creative chamber jazz perfection.

Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland 50th Anniversary (Sony)

Repackaging of milestone rock albums is still the rage even as the compact disc as a physical musical format continues to wane with advance of other intangible digital formats. Hendrix has had his fair share of legacy parceled and promoted along these lines and it’s hard to fault the family for seeking to both cash-in and do right by his memory. Electric Ladyland 50th Anniversary does better than most past projects in this regard by hewing to a logical presentation and proffering some genuine value across three compact discs, a Blu-ray and a lavish LP-sized container replete hardcover tome covering all the minutiae of the original double-album phenomenon. And let’s face it, Hendrix fooling around with songs in their protean forms is more fun than sitting down with most rock musicians’ finished product.

Jack Sels – Minor Works (SDBAN)

Parts of Belgian Jack Sels biography read like Hollywood-ready bohemian melodrama with riches, rags, tragedy and triumph all sewn into the story of a saxophonist who spent much of his life trying to capture the magic of his American idols while remaining fiercely true to his European roots. That latter decision explains his relative anonymity today, but the expertly-curated if humbly-titled Minor Works is practically bursting with recovered music and anecdotal context that frames a vivid portrait of a player well-deserving of posthumous consideration.

Jon Irabagon

Irabagon’s a dues-payer, tireless and admirably selfless in his dedication to a revolving door of projects and regular gigs. A recent interview with clarinetist & podcaster Jeremiah Cymerman reveals just how cool and unflappable a customer the Filipino-American saxophonist can be as he relates exercising the patience of Job in the face of dunderheaded racism by erstwhile peers. On the aural front two specific contexts stuck with me as evidence of his indefatigability. Dr. Quixotic’s Traveling Exotics on his own Irabbagast imprint teams his quartet with veteran trumpeter Tim Hagans in a program that feels like a natural and more focused extension of earlier work in Mostly Other People Do the Killing. Dave Douglas’ Brazen Heart: Live at the Jazz Standard released on the trumpeter’s Greenleaf label explores one of Irabagon’s recurring sideman posts and at length over eight discs covering a four-night stand at the titular NYC club in 2015.

Roscoe Mitchell

Recent and nascent masterworks with nearly a half-century of revelatory activity between them, Ride the Wind (Nessa) and Sound (Delmark) represent two essential signposts in Roscoe Michell’s reliably iconoclastic career. Both center on the blurring the subjective boundaries between improvisation and composition. Whether adapting improvised solos to orchestral charts or atomizing ensemble interplay into a freeing malleable framework that can take participating musicians in a multiplicity of expressive directions, Mitchell’s courageous adherence to personal designs and investigations has always been the bedrock of his work.

Intakt

The Swiss Intakt imprint bridges the best aspects of a classic label construct (reliable stable, dependable production values, deep catalog, etc.) with a refreshing willingness to tweak the formula through a voracious ear for new talent. German altoist Angelica Niescer’s triumphant Berlin Concert and a pair of from Cuban pianist Auran Oritz, Live in Zurich with his working trio and Random Dances and (A)tonalities in the unexpected company of clarinetist Don Byron fit that latter bill. Globe Unity 50 Years celebrating the half-century longevity of Europe’s most influential improvising orchestra and Music for David Mossman by the equally indelible trio of Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Paul Lytton argue conclusively that the former end of Intakt’s endeavors is equally secure.

Clean Feed

Staunch loyalists to the tradition of improvisational album in physical form, Lisbon-based Clean Feed doesn’t just soldier on, it leads away with a release docket that reliably weds frequency with dependability. The sixteen discs that hit circulation in the span since January all have elements to recommend them, but two stuck to my ears and cranium more tenaciously than the others for both their audacity and intimacy. Vocalist Serpa’s Close Up is exactly that, a sans-net song forum with the stark support of Ingrid Laubrock’s saxophones and Erik Friedlander’s cello as the sum of sounding board. Similarly, trumpeter Susana Santos Silva’s All the Rivers situates her solitary horn in the unforgiving acoustics of the Panteão Nacional, a vast marble cathedral, for a recital rife with reverberating complexity.

Satoko Fuji – 12 for 60 Project

Year-long artist celebrations through output aren’t exactly common, but there’s certainly precedence (bassist Reuben Radding’s 12 in 2007 springs to mind). Already admirably prolific Japanese pianist Satoko Fuji decided to commemorate her 60th birthday on the planet by releasing a dozen albums on the Libra label over the course of the annum. As with her back catalog, many of them featured her kindred spirit Natsuki Tamura on trumpet as well as ensembles both familiar and freshly-minted. I’m still digesting the series in sum, but the standout so far is Aspiration, the core duo’s conclave with Wadada Leo Smith and electronicst Ikue Mori. Fuji has an admitted tendency to crowd the market and numb the senses with her productivity, but the focus and unity guiding these releases sets them apart.

Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris

In common with the intimation of its name, Dust to Digital is a label that takes its time in the laudable work of producing archival music collections that stand instantly apart in terms of quality, scope and expertly-examined context. Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris is a work of art from the packaging to the sounds (and sights) contained within. Incisively indexed into three categories (Blues, Gospel & Folk), the field recordings are immersive and often carry the mesmerizing magic of incantations. A fourth disc containing a DVD collection of Ferris’ hand-shot films evokes time, place and person even more vividly. Temporary antidotes to slowly normalizing nightmare we find ourselves in as a world abound on this list, but this the one I have probably returned to most since my first encounter. It’s that transportive.

V/A – Technicolor Paradise: Rhum Rhapsodies & Other Delights

Exotica was originally indicative a certain slice of commercial music expression, one inextricably entangled in associative issues of appropriation, exploitation and in many cases mollification of indigenous cultural capital. Sometimes it was a complete recontextualization entirely as Numero Group’s Technicolor Paradise explores over three discs and an associative booklet brimming with commentary. This sort of deep crate project is nothing new for the label, but it is gratifying to see them go at it with such gusto after an earlier and unexpected embrace by the label honchos of streaming as a means of revenue. Some selections tip irrevocably into bromidic kitsch, but the first disc especially, which focuses on guitar bands keeps a more even keel of interest.

Charlie McCoy – Real McCoy/Charlie McCoy/Good Time Charlie/Fastest Harp in the South

Jerry Reed – Jerry Reed Explores Guitar Country/Cookin’/Georgia Sunshine/Me & Jerry (w/ Chet Atkins)

Time was when a two-fer reissue was a common currency in the compact disc market place. BGO’s done that erstwhile staple two better maintaining a fearsome foursome reissue program. Sets by country mouth harp maestro Charlie McCoy and good old boy-turned-ace guitar picker-turned-movie star Jerry Reed. Both are dipped liberally in countrypolitan production values that only occasionally slide over into schmaltz and McCoy wisely avoids vocals in favor of instrumentals that often sound like they could serve as soundtrack snippets to The Rockford Files (not a bad thing). Reed by contrast had a decent set up pipes to complement his strings-slinging skills and the chutzpah to try his hand at dry humor like the hilariously off-the-cuff ode to inconsolable nicotine addiction, “Another Puff.”

V/A – The Beginning of the End: The Existential Psychodrama in Country Music 1956 to 1972 (Omni) V/A – Hillbillies in Hell: Country Music’s Tormented Testament (1952-1974) – The Resurrection (Omni) V/A – Hillbillies in Hell: Country Music’s Tormented Testament (1952-1974) – The Rapture (Omni)

After an unexplained although far from unnoticed hiatus several years ago, the Omni Recording Corporation out of Australia roared back to life with renewed reissue campaign. The schedule of new projects eschewed full album(s) + plus bonus tracks for keenly curated collections focusing on the wilder and more tortured sides of the vintage country and country/pop spectrum. The Beginning of the End details descents into madness committed to song while two volumes more of the ongoing Hillbillies in Hell series doubled the entries to date describing that region of idiom(s) devoted to Beelzebub and his myriad earthly incarnations. All three are archly edifying as they are fun.

Sun Ra

Sun Ra reissues are once again a semi-regularity now thanks to reissue operators like Modern Harmonic and Cosmic Myth, both of which have conscripted longtime Ra repository Michael D. Anderson in their noble endeavors. Cymbals/Symbol Sessions: New York 1973 covers ground previously mapped by an earlier set on the Evidence label pairing worthy material including the (16:33) John Gilmore tenor <I<tour de force “Thoughts Under a Dark Blue Light.” God is More Than Love Can Ever Be has singular status as the solitary piano, bass and drums trio album in the entirely of Ra’s omniversal oeuvre and largely lives up to the stated promise of that proposition.

25 more in no fixed order...

Tyshawn Sorey – Pillars (Pi)

Henry Threadgill – Dirt… And More Dirt (Pi)

Peter Kuhn Trio – Intention (FMR)

Dave Holland – Uncharted Territories (Dare2)

Devin Gray – Dirigo Rataplan II (Rataplan)

John Coltrane - Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album (Impulse!)

JD Allen – Love Stone (Savant)

Fay Victor’s SoundNoiseFunk – Wet Robots (ESP-Disk)

A Pride of Lions – The Bridge Sessions 8

Michael Adkins – Flaneur (hatOLOGY)

Houston Person & Ron Carter – Remember Love (HighNote)

Spontaneous Music Ensemble – Karyobin (Emanem)

Cecil Taylor – Poschiavo (Black Sun)

Paul Rutherford – In Backwards Times (Emanem)

Mike Westbrook Concert Band – The Last Night at the Old Place (Cadillac)

Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar – Raga Yaman & Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani (Ideologic Organ)

Kitsos Harisiadis – Lament in a Deep Style: 1929 to 1931 (Third Man)

Asnakech Worku – Asnakech (Awesome Tapes from Africa)

V/A – African Scream Contest 2 (Analog Africa)

Mulatu – Afro-Latin Soul (Worthy/Strut)

V/A – Listen All Around: The Golden Age of Central & East African Music (Dust to Digital)

V/A – Ocora – Le Monde Des Musiques Traditionelles (Ocora)

V/A – Music City Blues & Rhythm (Ace)

Professor Harold Boggs – Lord Give Me Strength: Early Recordings 1952-1964 (Nashboro/Gospel Friend)

Yuri Morozov – Strange Angels: Experimental & Electronic Music (Buried Treasure)

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maxwellyjordan · 6 years

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Symposium: In the Louisiana abortion case, maybe the best defense is a good offense

Michael C. Dorf is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell University. He blogs at dorfonlaw.org.

Chief Justice John Roberts surprised some observers when he joined his four more liberal colleagues to grant a stay of the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in June Medical Services v. Gee. The stay blocked Louisiana’s law requiring doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. The petitioners argued that the Louisiana law was substantially similar to the Texas admitting privileges law that the Supreme Court invalidated less than three years ago in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. The petitioners also contended that the distinctions drawn by the appeals court between the two states’ laws were unpersuasive. The chief justice dissented in Whole Woman’s Health. By voting to stay the Louisiana law, was he signaling a retreat from his position there? Does he now accept the court’s abortion jurisprudence as settled?

Maybe, but there is a simpler and likelier explanation. Roberts cares a great deal about the Supreme Court as an institution. When a state court or lower federal court defies or evades the high court’s precedents, it challenges the court’s authority. Accordingly, it is easy to imagine that the chief justice thinks Whole Woman’s Health and the cases it applied — including Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey — should be overruled. However, he does not take kindly to lower courts usurping his court’s prerogative of deciding whether and when to overrule its own cases.

If institutionalism better explains Roberts’ stay vote than does a change of heart on the merits, then the questions posed by this symposium — should the court grant certiorari and, if so, how should it rule? — are highly problematic for citizens, lawyers and scholars who, like me, believe the court should not cut back on the constitutional abortion right.

To be slightly more precise, only the first question poses a problem. The second question is easy. If the Supreme Court grants review, it should summarily reverse the 5th Circuit on the authority of Whole Woman’s Health, which was itself correctly decided. As I argued in an essay for a SCOTUSblog symposium on that case, Casey did not displace that portion of the holding in Roe that forbids the state from imposing obstacles to abortion simply by the pretense of promoting women’s health.

Moreover, Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion in Whole Woman’s Health helpfully clarified what was already implicit in the notion of an undue burden — that whether a law regulating abortion is constitutional depends in part on whether the burdens it imposes on women in fact promote health (or any other compelling government interest). Because an admitting-privileges requirement does not advance the state’s asserted health interest in any meaningful way — in Texas or Louisiana — it is unconstitutional.

If I could say with confidence that a majority of the current Supreme Court would faithfully apply its abortion jurisprudence, then I would urge the court to grant the petition for a writ of certiorari in June solely for the purpose of summarily reversing the 5th Circuit. Because I lack that confidence, I am uncertain what to urge.

Should the Supreme Court deny certiorari in June, its stay order would dissolve by its own terms. The result would be to deny access to safe legal abortion to a great many women in Louisiana. But that’s not all. Allowing the 5th Circuit ruling to go into effect would embolden that court to uphold other restrictive laws from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. It would send the same signal to other federal judges around the country — a group that becomes more hostile to abortion rights practically by the day, thanks to the laser-like focus on transforming the judiciary of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Trump administration.

Yet bad as a cert denial would be for abortion rights, a cert grant poses the danger of an outright overruling of Roe, Casey and Whole Woman’s Health. More likely but perhaps equally dangerously, the Supreme Court could grant cert in June, place the case on its plenary docket, and, following briefing and argument, affirm the 5th Circuit’s judgment upholding the Louisiana law based on some unpersuasive distinction between the Texas and Louisiana laws.

There is precedent for such a move. In 2000, in Stenberg v. Carhart, the Supreme Court invalidated Nebraska’s “partial-birth” abortion ban, but seven years later, in Gonzales v. Carhart, it upheld a federal partial-birth ban. Although the court invoked some relatively minor differences between the Nebraska and federal laws, the real difference was in the court’s personnel. In the interim, Justice Samuel Alito replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor; flipping that vote flipped the outcome.

Likewise, since the Supreme Court decided Whole Woman’s Health, Justice Neil Gorsuch has filled the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh has taken the seat that opened upon the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast a fifth vote to strike down the Texas law in Whole Woman’s Health. As we have already seen from Kavanaugh’s dissent from the stay order in June, he seems prepared to draw some very fine distinctions to avoid invalidating the Louisiana abortion law.

That leaves Roberts as the one justice even potentially in play. By voting to grant the stay in June, he indicated that he does not think the 5th Circuit persuasively distinguished the Texas and Louisiana laws. Perhaps with more time he will find some hitherto unknown distinction persuasive, but it is also possible that he will vote to overrule Whole Woman’s Health, based on reasoning like that in Alito’s dissent in that case, which Roberts joined. In Part III of his Whole Woman’s Health dissent, Alito argued that the Texas law did not unduly burden the abortion right, because, among other things, based on one tendentious reading of the record, 95 percent of Texas women would have to travel “only” a distance of 150 miles or less to find an abortion provider.

It is hard to say whether abortion rights would be less secure if the Supreme Court in June were to pretend to apply its pre-Whole Woman’s Health precedents while in fact hollowing them out or were simply to overrule its abortion-rights precedents forthrightly. At least with the latter course, defenders of abortion rights would have a focal point around which to rally in the political sphere.

That said, one should not spend much energy wondering whether disingenuous application or outright rejection of the abortion cases is worse. The Supreme Court under the leadership of Roberts has tended to employ these moves in tandem, first weakening a legal doctrine or principle and then discarding its empty husk.

Before the Court held the coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional in Shelby County v. Holder, it first purported to duck the issue in Northwest Austin Municip. Dist. No. One v. Holder. Before the Roberts Court abandoned the Burger Court precedent upholding agency-shop arrangements against free speech challenges in Janus v. AFSCME, it questioned but purported to apply that Burger-era precedent in Knox v. SEIU, Local 1000. If, in June, the Roberts Court undercuts but does not formally abandon the constitutional right to abortion, the decision should be understood as the opening salvo in a longer contest.

On second thought, “opening” is the wrong word. A Supreme Court ruling upholding the Louisiana law in June would be the near-culmination of a near-half-century campaign. Through a combination of luck, the Electoral College, and what Professors Joseph Fishkin and David Pozen call “asymmetrical constitutional hardball,” Republican presidents have named 14 of 18 justices in the last 50 years, despite losing the popular vote in a majority of presidential elections during that period. Given how central overturning Roe has been to the Republican coalition, it is hardly surprising that that the abortion right is precarious. The remarkable fact is that it remains on the books at all.

* * *

Past cases linked to in this post:

Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124 (2007) Janus v. Am. Fed’n of State, Cnty., & Mun. Emps., Council 31, 138 S. Ct. 2448 (2018) Knox v. Serv. Employees Int’l Union, 132 S. Ct. 2277 (2012) Nw. Austin Mun. Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 557 U.S. 193 (2009) Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013) Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914 (2000) Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, 136 S. Ct. 2292 (2016)

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accidental-ambience · 6 years

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On Monday, in an interview with The Intercept, Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat who in November became the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress, went public with her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to use economic pressure on Israel to secure Palestinian rights. That made her the second incoming member of Congress to publicly back B.D.S., after Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar, who revealed her support last month.

No current member of Congress supports B.D.S., a movement that is deeply taboo in American politics for several reasons. Opponents argue that singling out Israel for economic punishment is unfair and discriminatory, since the country is far from the world’s worst violator of human rights. Further, the movement calls for the right of Palestinian refugees and millions of their descendants to return to Israel, which could end Israel as a majority-Jewish state. (Many B.D.S. supporters champion a single, binational state for both peoples.) Naturally, conservatives in the United States — though not only conservatives — have denounced Tlaib and Omar’s stance as anti-Semitic.

It is not. The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand that depends on treating Israel as the embodiment of the Jewish people everywhere. Certainly, some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, but it’s entirely possible to oppose Jewish ethno-nationalism without being a bigot. Indeed, it’s increasingly absurd to treat the Israeli state as a stand-in for Jews writ large, given the way the current Israeli government has aligned itself with far-right European movements that have anti-Semitic roots.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

The interests of the State of Israel and of Jews in the diaspora may at times coincide, but they’ve never been identical. Right-wing anti-Semites have sometimes supported Zionism because they don’t want Jews in their own countries — a notable example is the Polish government in the 1930s.

Conversely, there’s a long history of Jewish anti-Zionism or non-Zionism, both secular and religious. In 1950 Jacob Blaustein, the president of the American Jewish Committee, one of the country’s most important Jewish organizations, reached an agreement with Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in which Ben-Gurion essentially promised not to claim to speak for American Jews. “Jews of the United States, as a community and as individuals, have no political attachment to Israel,” said Blaustein at the time.

Decades later, such a statement from the committee — or any major, mainstream Jewish organization — would be unthinkable. A consensus set in “that Jewish identity can be reduced to Israelism,” Eliyahu Stern, an associate professor of modern Jewish history at Yale, told me. “That’s something that takes place over the second half of the 20th century in America.”

The centrality of Israel to American Jewish identity has at times put liberal American Jews in an awkward position, defending multiethnic pluralism here, where they’re in the minority, while treating it as unspeakable in Israel, where Jews are the majority. (American white nationalists, some of whom liken their project to Zionism, love to poke at this contradiction.)

Until fairly recently, it was easy enough for many liberals to dismiss consistency on Israel as a hobgoblin of little minds. A binational state might sound nice in theory, but in practice is probably a recipe for civil war. (Even the Belgians have trouble managing it.) The two-state solution appeared to offer a route to both satisfying Palestinian national aspirations and preserving Israel’s Jewish, democratic character.

Now, however, Israel has foreclosed the possibility of two states, relentlessly expanding into the West Bank and signaling to the world that the Palestinians will never have a capital in East Jerusalem. As long as the de facto policy of the Israeli government is that there should be only one state in historic Palestine, it’s unreasonable to regard Palestinian demands for equal rights in that state as anti-Semitic. If the Israeli government is going to treat a Palestinian state as a ridiculous pipe dream, the rest of us can’t act as if such a state is the only legitimate goal of Palestinian activism.

At times, I’ve agreed with those who see something disproportionate in the left’s fixation on Israel. But the oft-heard argument that other peoples are suffering more than the Palestinians can be a form of weaponized whataboutism, meant to elide the unique role America plays as Israel’s protector.

In an op-ed essay in The Wall Street Journal last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo listed Saudi Arabia’s growing ties to Israel as a reason not to downgrade America’s relationship with the kingdom, despite the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. If the Trump administration is going to use our alliance with Israel as an excuse for abandoning fundamental values, surely Americans are justified in subjecting that alliance to special scrutiny.

Meanwhile, Israel is ever more willing to ally itself with foreign leaders who share its illiberal nationalism, even when they’re hostile to Jews. “In the past, Israel has always adhered to a clear policy that it will not engage with political parties ostracized by the local Jewish community,” Anshel Pfeffer wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, wrote Pfeffer, “has abandoned this policy.”

Netanyahu has nurtured a particularly close relationship with the Hungarian right-wing populist Viktor Orban, whose government is waging a demonization campaign against the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire George Soros. Just this week Soros’s Central European University announced it has been forced out of Hungary. And Netanyahu’s office is trying to negotiate a compromise with Hungary over the contents of a museum that many fear will whitewash Hungary’s role in the Nazi genocide of the Jews, essentially putting Israel’s imprimatur on a modified form of Holocaust revisionism.

Netanyahu, then, seems to understand that being pro-Israel and pro-Jewish are not the same thing. Liberal American Jews, particularly younger ones, are learning that lesson as well. Some staunch Zionists are bad for the Jews — witness Steve King, the Republican congressman from Iowa who invokes his support for Israel when he’s called out for his blatant white nationalism.

At the same time, people with an uncompromising commitment to pluralistic democracy will necessarily be critics of contemporary Israel. That commitment, however, makes them the natural allies of Jews everywhere else.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn

#israel

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