Author: Kunal Jasty

This Week's Show • June 19, 2014

Vijay Iyer: Jazz in the 21st Century

Where is jazz headed in a new century? With the pianist Vijay Iyer as guide, newly tenured as a professor at Harvard, it tends toward the experimental, with drummers, young musicians and slam poets. If it doesn’t always swing, it’s surprising and takes you in new directions. Will jazz be forgotten or just re-shaped by new, emerging artists like Vijay Iyer?
Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music & Beauty, Part I
Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music & Beauty, Part II
Robin Kelley's Transcendental Thelonious Monk
Miles Davis' Kind of Blue

Where is jazz headed in a new century? With the pianist Vijay Iyer as guide, newly tenured as a professor at Harvard, it tends toward the experimental, with drummers, young musicians and slam poets. If it doesn’t always swing, it’s surprising and takes you in new directions. Will jazz be forgotten or just re-shaped by new, emerging artists like Vijay Iyer?

Here’s a short sample of the show. Vijay Iyer brings you inside the head of a jazz improviser and describes the expressive give and take conversation musicians are having with each other. Click on the black bar at the top of the page to listen to the whole show.



As you can see by this infographic from Google, jazz audiences have been shrinking since the 1960s, supplanted by rock mostly, so the question is: will jazz be forgotten or just reshaped by new, emerging artists like Vijay Iyer?

fina copy

 

And here’s the playlist from the show:

Thank you to Michael Lutch for the photos above.

This Week's Show •

Boston Noir

Noir heroes tend not to be gangsters of Whitey Bulger’s grandeur; not tough cops either: they’re punched-out boxers and junkies, little perps, prisoners, victims reduced to victimizing each other and themselves.
Nick Flynn Reads "Embrace Noir"
Nick Flynn: The Day Lou Reed Died
Howie Winter, Whitey Bulger's rival inside the Winter Hill King, kissing criminal-turned-actor Alex Rocco, with Robert Mitchum in the front at left. (Photo courtesy Howie Carr/Emily Sweeney.)

Howie Winter, Whitey Bulger’s rival inside the Winter Hill King, kissing criminal-turned-actor Alex Rocco, with Robert Mitchum in the front at left. (Photo courtesy Howie Carr/Emily Sweeney.)

Boston noir is an art of darkness, under an overcast sky and fishy salt-air smell of the  waterfront. It’s now a sort of signature of our city, in novels that became movies, like The Town, The Departed, and The Fighter. You can hear a lot of it  in the broken voice of Robert Mitchum, playing the title character in the movie, The Friends of Eddie Coyle.  He’s in a breakfast joint with a rookie gun dealer, warning him that there’s a price to be paid for screwing up, as he did in a botched gun sale, earning a new set of knuckles:

They just come up to you and say, “Look. You made somebody mad. You made a big mistake and now there’s somebody doing time for it. There’s nothing personal in it, you understand, it just has to be done. Now get your hand out there.” You think about not doing it, you know. When I was a kid in Sunday school, this nun, she used to say, “Stick your hand out. ” I stick my hand out. Whap! She’d knock me across the knuckles with a steel-edge ruler. So one day I says, when she told me, “Stick your hand out” I says, “No. ” She whapped me right across the face with the ruler. Same thing. They put your hand in a drawer. Somebody kicks the drawer shut. Ever hear bones breaking? Just like a man snapping a shingle. Hurts like a bastard.

Dennis Lehane, who wrote Mystic River, says noir is working-class tragedy — different from other kinds. “In Shakespeare,” Lehane puts it, “tragic heroes fall from mountaintops; in noir, they fall from curbs.”  Noir heroes tend not to be gangsters of Whitey Bulger’s grandeur; not tough cops either: they’re punched-out boxers and junkies, little perps, prisoners, victims reduced to victimizing each other and themselves. Noir is the bottom of underground capitalism, talking to itself.  It’s bad things happening to bad guys, giving and getting the punishment they think they deserve. More noir images from camera of Leslie Jones, preserved on the Boston Public Library’s Flickr page. Use arrows to navigate, and see more here.

This Week's Show • July 31, 2014

The End of Work

The jobless economy: a fully automated, engineered, robotic system that doesn’t need YOU, or me either. Anything we can do, machines can do better - surgery, warfare, farming, finance. What’s to do: shall we smash the machines, or go to the beach, or finally learn to play the piano?

 

Guest List:

The jobless economy: a fully automated, engineered, robotic system that doesn’t need YOU, or me either. Anything we can do, machines can do better – surgery, warfare, farming, finance. What’s to do: shall we smash the machines, or go to the beach, or finally learn to play the piano?

First, some numbers.

There’s a trend in the economy that came up big in our show on Thomas Piketty’s inequality tome. Between 2000 and 2014, the median U.S. income has actually dropped: from $55,986 to $51,017. Over the same period corporate profits have more than doubled. The workforce participation rate in May of this year was 62.8%, the lowest since 1978. The level of investment in equipment and software bounced back to 95% of its historical peak just two years after the same recession that trashed all the jobs that have been so slow to come back.

One of the questions of that inequality story — big gains at the top, stagnation (or worse) at the middle and bottom — is how much is owed to the technology part of the capital, and really the automation of jobs formerly held by human beings. We know that the number of American ‘routine jobs’ dropped by 11 percent between 2001 and 2011. And a new study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University suggest that 47% of U.S. jobs might be vulnerable to loss by automation, with telemarketers, sewers, watch repairers, umpires, models, and cooks likeliest to go.

We start the conversation there, at what McAfee and Brynjolfsson call the “Great Decoupling,” the possibility that machines are beginning to destroy more jobs than they can create (in the short term, at least).

A Syllabus

• We’re watching two things this week: “King Joe,” a weird, half-hearted, casually racist cartoon about the dream of a technologized workforce, and the long, terrific Adam Curtis doc All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace… on Ayn Rand and the utopian dream of computers, named for the terrific Brautigan poem.

• The great work theorist Peter Frase has taken on four futures, utopian and dystopian, contained within the move to automation. (He’s turning it into a book!)

• George Saunders contributed a story to Chipotle to bring on their bags hoping for an end to work:

Note to future generations: Still have “bosses”? Bosses still intrusive? Still have “offices”? Future offices = high tech? All you have to do to raise temperature is think, “Raise temperature in office,” computer does? People move from place to place on invisible air-cars? People think: “AirCar, take me to Copy Room,” soon are soundlessly proceeding to Copy Room? Except there is no Copy Room, because paper obsolete, all documents projected on to screen inside brain? Sometimes, for prank, future person sends ton of random copies into brain of friend, friend cannot walk/see, has to feel way to AirCar, say: “AirCar, take me to Frank’s cubicle, am going to kill Frank for flooding my brain with random copies.” In your (future) time, boss can just stay in own (plush) office, nosing into what (excellent, responsible) worker might be writing in own spare time? Worker can send boss mental message: If you are so smart, Mr. Kenner, why branch shrinking, why did you have to lay off Jerry Ringer?

Jerry = good guy. Really miss Jerry. Jerry = dear friend. People still get fired in future? Even person with new baby? Hope not. Hope that, in future, all is well, everyone eats free, no one must work, all just sit around feeling love for one another.

• We think we’ve got a problem, but automation trouble looms largest in the developing world. Countries around the world have universally risen through a ‘sweatshop phase,’ a time-delayed industrialization. Foxconn, the famous producer of Apple products, is automating millions of those gateway Chinese jobs. And our guest Andrew McAfee gives the example of Nike:

 Nike’s successive sustainability reports reveals that the company used 106,000 fewer contract employees around the world in 2013 than 2012 (a greater than 9% drop), even as both profits and revenues increased by 16% and 5%, respectively.

What would you do in a world without work? Leave us a message here.

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Podcast • July 20, 2014

Earth 2.0

With hundreds of Earth-like planets discovered over the past few years, it’s fair to say we’re on the verge of finding alien life. Two new programs at NASA hope to find and analyze thousands more of these exoplanets, as they’re called. Scientists working on the Transiting Exoplanet Surveying Satellite (TESS) and the James Webb Space Telescope say there’s a very real chance of finding extraterrestrial life within the next two decades. So, if we're about to meet our extraterrestrial neighbors, let’s get to work on some opening lines. What if we're really not alone?

kepler

 

Guest List:

  • David Latham, Astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
  • Dimitar Sasselov, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative,
  • Jason Wright, Professor of Astronomy at Penn State, expert in the search for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations,
  • Sarah Rugheimer, PhD student at Harvard University studying the atmospheres of exoplanets.

With hundreds of Earth-like planets discovered over the past few years, it’s fair to say we’re on the verge of finding alien life. Two new programs at NASA hope to find and analyze thousands more of these exoplanets, as they’re called.  Scientists working on the Transiting Exoplanet Surveying Satellite (TESS) and the James Webb Space Telescope say there’s a very real chance of finding extraterrestrial life within the next two decades. So, if we’re about to meet our extraterrestrial neighbors, let’s get to work on some opening lines. What if we’re really not alone?

What’s the news?

The search for exoplanets is heating up — they’ve found 700 exoplanets in the last six months.
Some of them are very strange: There’s Kepler-421b, which has a year that lasts 704 days, the longest on record for a small ‘transiting’ planet. Then there’s a gas giant  that orbits 20,000 times further away from its star than Earth is from the Sun. It takes tens of thousands of our years to go around once.

They’ve found a planet turning around a star in a binary-star system, and another planet in the so-called ‘Goldilocks’ or habitable zone that’s rocky like the Earth but 17 times more massive. For a (growing) list of the most extreme exoplanets, look here.

The big news is that the Milky Way alone contains by NASA’s estimate as many as 100 billion other planets, 10% of which might be in the right zone. This makes it all the likelier that there’s life out there, as astronomers have long suspected. All it took was someone to look using the right equipment.

All this sets up the flashy NASA announcement that we will find alien life in next twenty years. Is that plausible? is the question.

What’s next?

There are two planned telescopic/observational projects that are going to change the exoplanet search fundamentally.

TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) will launch in 2017. It’s run out of MIT, with funding from Google. And its mission will be to perform a “whole-sky survey” — covering 400 times more sky than Kepler has — looking at the brightest stars for transiting exoplanets.

Then the James Webb Space Telescope (really the next Hubble) will serve as the big eye in the sky for the foreseeable future after a delayed launch in 2018. It will launch in 2018, with ‘remote sensing’ infrared sight that will allow astronomers on the ground to look for chemical patterns coming off of planets that suggest life.

There’s still a long way to go for positive proof, though — the necessary rocketry and observation technology isn’t even on the books yet.

Life

The search right now is limited to looking for planets at the right size and in the right neighborhood with respect to their star: that ‘habitable zone’.

The astronomer Christopher McKay says we need to look, when we have better instruments, for six components that, found together, are ‘certainly damn interesting’: oxygen, “temperature, water, sunlight, nitrogen, and nothing that will kill” everything. Life like ours depends on the climate control that comes from water, too; astrobiologists are highlighting the importance of a water ocean.

The worries

Stephen Hawking wants us to lay off the search for alien life:

“I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach… If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the American Indians.”

Nick Bostrom says any proof of advanced life anywhere is bad news. The Fermi Paradox implies little communicating life in our neighborhood. That could be because of one of two “Great Filters”:

a) The advent of life is surprisingly rare, and we’re precious!; or
b) All life keeps wiping itself out past a certain point of development, due to machine superintelligence or environmental collapse.

Back to earth: there are now and ever will be funding troubles. Shifting away from SETI and going to what Latham called the long-cut way — “searching for abodes” — made this work more palatable as pure science and less sci-fi. SETI got Senator Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” award for government spending.

Still, NASA has had to team up with the Canadian and European space agencies to launch the $8.8 billion James Webb telescope. Sarah Seager says the exoplanet search is the test of

whether or not we as a society still believe in building marvelous things and in bearing the costs and disappointments that invariably attend such projects. It is a question uniquely addressed to Americans, for if we do not build the James Webb Space Telescope, no one else will.

By the Way • July 14, 2014

The Five NSA Programs You Should Know About

It’s been a little over a year since revelations from Edward Snowden’s historic NSA leak started appearing in newspapers around the world, and information about new surveillance programs is still surfacing every month. Last week, The Washington Post analyzed 160,000 NSA records and found that “ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted” by NSA surveillance programs. Four days later, Glenn Greenwald released the names of five distinguished Muslim-American men whose emails were being monitored by the NSA, none of whom are suspected of any wrongdoing.

By Kunal Jasty

“Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.”
Barton Gellman in The Washington Post, December 23, 2013.

It’s been a little over a year since revelations from Edward Snowden’s historic NSA leak started appearing in newspapers around the world, and information about new surveillance programs is still surfacing every month. Last week, The Washington Post analyzed 160,000 NSA records and found that “ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted” by NSA surveillance programs. Four days later, Glenn Greenwald released the names of five distinguished Muslim-American men whose emails were being monitored by the NSA, none of whom are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Here’s a roundup of the five (previously) top-secret NSA surveillance programs that you should know about.

1. XKeyscore

Speaking from Hong Kong last June to journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden made his most famous statement about the extent of NSA mass-surveillance programs: “I, sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.”

Journalists had already known about NSA efforts to collect internet and phone data for nearly a decade. By 2007, the NSA was adding one to two billion internet records to its databases daily. In 2010, The Washington Post reported that “every day, collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications.” What we didn’t know was whose communications were being stored, and what ability NSA analysts had to access them.

When Snowden revealed the stunning power he had as a contractor for the NSA, he was referring to the NSA’s XKeyscore program — a program previously unknown to the public — which gives analysts the ability to easily search through the staggering amount of internet data collected and stored by the NSA every day.

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Using XKeyscore, an NSA analyst can simply type in an email address or IP address of a “target” and access their emails, search history, visited websites, and even Facebook chats. The program’s leaked slides boast that XKeyscore’s ability to analyze HTTP data allows it to see “nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet.”

Want to know who searched for Pakistani President Musharraf on the BBC’s website?

How about “everyone in Sweden that visits a particular web forum”?

“The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years. And what these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things. It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future.”
Glenn Greenwald to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, July 27, 2013

Original Report: “XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet,’” The Guardian, July 31, 2013

 

2. FASCIA

FASCIA is the NSA’s real-life Marauder’s Map. In December 2013, Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani of The Washington Post reported that FASCIA was collecting nearly 5 billion pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of cellphones worldwide every day.

For your cell phone to work, your service provider needs to know its approximate location. Your phone transmits this information to the nearest cell towers, which the network can then use to triangulate your location. According to leaked NSA documents, FASCIA works by storing this location data when it is passed along the cables that connect different mobile networks. An NSA analyst sitting at a desk in Maryland can then search through this stored data to track the location of a specific phone user.

Perhaps the most interesting (and scariest) functionality of FASCIA is its “Co-Traveler Analytics.” By comparing a known target’s cell phone location with the location of other cell phones during an hour-long time window, the NSA can isolate groups of cell phones traveling together to find associates of the known target.

The Washington Post made an excellent graphic that explains the FASCIA program:
cell phone

Original Report: “NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show,” The Washington Post, December 4, 2013

 

3. Optic Nerve

Think TSA full-body scanners are intrusive? The UK’s surveillance agency GCHQ collaborated with the NSA to create Optic Nerve, a program that automatically stores webcam images of users chatting on Yahoo Messenger.

During one six-month period in 2008, Optic Nerve collected images from 1.8 million Yahoo accounts. It inserts each image, even those without a known target, into NSA databases, which can then be searched by analysts using XKeyscore. Again, all this happens without a court warrant.
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Surprising to no one besides the NSA, an estimated 3.4%-10.8% of the images taken were sexually explicit:
ON

Yahoo denied any knowledge of Optic Nerve, calling it “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy,” and promised to start to encrypt all Yahoo services by April 2014. As of today, Yahoo Messenger remains unencrypted.

Original Report: “Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ,” The Guardian, February 27, 2014

4. Boundless Informant

Boundless Informant, besides having a unenviably unsubtle name for NSA officials to have to explain front of Congress, is perhaps the most damning evidence so far that the NSA is conducting mass surveillance inside the United States.

Boundless Informant helps the NSA analyze and visualize the, well, boundless amounts of metadata information it collects around the world. (Metadata, or “data about data”, is all the information about a piece of data besides the actual content of the data. For example, metadata about telephone calls includes the phone numbers of the caller and recipient, as well as the location and duration of the call, but not the words in the call itself.)

The top surveilled countries in 2013 were Iran, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and India. Image from The Guardian.

The map above shows that in March 2013 alone, the NSA collected over 73 billion metadata records worldwide. Despite the NSA’s assurance that it does not intentionally collect data on Americans, nearly 3 billion pieces of metadata were collected from the United States alone.

If you want to see what your own metadata looks like, engineers at the MIT media lab developed a program called Immersion that analyzes your email metadata to create a cluster chart of your social connections.

Original Report: “Boundless Informant: the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance data,” The Guardian, June 11, 2013

5. Dishfire

Like FASCIA, Dishfire targets cell phones. More specifically, it collects nearly 200 million text messages daily around the world, using them to view financial transactions, monitor border crossings, and meetings between unsavory characters.

According to The Guardian, each day the NSA stores:


• More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)

• Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts

• More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.

• Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users

Using Dishfire, the NSA can extract names, geocoordinates, missed calls, SIM card changes, roaming information, travel, financial transactions, and passwords from a user’s cell phone.

According to The Guardian, the NSA “has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more — including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.”

The NSA has stated that they removes all text messages involving U.S. citizens from their databases, and that “privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire.” Based on this week’s Washington Post report that nearly half of NSA surveillance files involve Americans, it’s hard to take their word for it.

Original Report: “NSA collects millions of text messages daily in ‘untargeted’ global sweep,” The Washington Post, January 16, 2014

Podcast • July 11, 2014

Yu Hua: China’s Revolution Addiction

Everybody loves Yu Hua, a giant of the literary life in China today. He’s a free spirit with a critical eye, and a popular touch, a tragic vision, an easy laugh. It is a main theme in much of Yu Hua’s work and our conversation that China is hooked for a century now on something like an addiction to Revolution. And a revolution, he reminds me with heavy irony, quoting Chairman Mao, is not a dinner party. It’s an insurrection, an act of violence.

yu hua 2

Everybody loves Yu Hua, a giant of the literary life in China today.  He’s a free spirit with a critical eye, and a popular touch, a tragic vision, an easy laugh.  We’re in the snazzy new Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai, video-recording a long conversation for Harvard’s ChinaX course on modern China.  As soon as Yu Hua walks in (with his striking 20-something son Phineas) his presence is magic, alike with the Chinese film crew and the young Harvard scholars. I know Yu Hua as much as anything through the long-suffering hero of his novel that became the movie masterpiece To Live. The film and its central character reminded me somehow of Charlie Chaplin, as I said to Yu Hua. He smiled and said, well, of course, he had studied the Chaplin archive. Were Fugui alive today, Yu Hua said he would most likely be among the victims of the Capitalist Revolution.  Fugui would have lost his land and been displaced as a farmer.  He might be living precariously in a tiny, unsafe apartment in a city, but he’d still be thoughtful, tidy, maybe cheerful, and indestructible.

It is a main theme in much of Yu Hua’s work and our conversation that China is hooked for a century now on something like an addiction to Revolution. And a revolution, he reminds me with heavy irony, quoting Chairman Mao, is not a dinner party.  It’s an insurrection, an act of violence.  The market revolution, he’s saying, is more like than unlike the notorious upheavals that preceded it: the war of “liberation” that brought the Communist Party to power in 1949; Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the 50s, a headlong rush to industrialize that ended in famine and death for 20-million or more; then the know-nothing Cultural Revolution of the 60s into the 70s.  The problem with all the endless revolutions is that they’ve been run by political monopolies.  They’re invariably violent, mobilized by propaganda, not participation.  And they’re generally heedless of long-term results – even in the market revolution that has made so many Chinese people rich.

Yu Hua reminds you that China is still a poor country – median income between ninety and a hundred in the ranking of nations, in the zone with Cuba, Angola, Iraq.

The wealth revolution that we’re conditioned to celebrate has been a hardship for most Chinese, he is saying.  The divorce rate goes up on the same curve as the GDP.  A “simmering rage” is the ruling popular emotion, he wrote in an invaluable collection of essays, China in Ten Words (2011).  The capitalist revolution has been bad for human-rights awareness. “This revolution has made the Chinese people profit-driven… They care less about other people, less about the country.”  Our people are losing their health, he says.  And what about their minds?  “People’s minds are chaotic, schizophrenic,” he replies.  “I can’t figure them out.”  The last resource is the Chinese people, I say, and surely they are not destroyed.  “I was half joking, half telling the truth,” he ends, with a laugh.

So we end on a Chinese paradox.  Yu Hua sums up China’s contradictory rules and symptoms today with the point that when guests enter a hotel room in China, they see a “No Smoking” sign and, under it, a gift package of cigarettes.  He lives with such anomalies every day. His novel To Live is sold in bookstores in China.  The movie version is banned.  “The book is like the cigarettes,” he said, “the movie is like the ‘No Smoking’ sign.”

It was a high-point in China so far to feel Yu Hua’s presence.

Podcast • July 8, 2014

Ruby Braff’s Tribute to Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong came out of the Colored Waifs’ Home in New Orleans and the honky-tonks of the red-light Storyville district. Then and ever after Louis Armstrong’s time and phrasing, his tone and spirit made him the most influential voice in 20th century American music. We’re appreciating the man the world came to know as Satchmo. Thousands of musicians and friends called him Pops. Our guest this hour, the cornet star Ruby Braff, always called him Louis.

Hoagy Carmichael, the song-writer of “Stardust” and “Georgia,” remembered the first time he heard Louis Armstrong play, in 1921. He dropped his cigarette and gulped his drink. “Why,” he moaned, “why isn’t everybody in the world here to hear that?”

Something so unutterably stirring, he knew, had to be heard by the world. And over the next 50 years indeed it was. Louis Armstrong came out of the Colored Waifs’ Home in New Orleans and the honky-tonks of the red-light Storyville district. In Chicago in the mid-twenties his small-group recordings on the Okeh label with the so-called Hot Fives and Hot Sevens revealed an original jazz genius, full-blown.

Then and ever after Louis Armstrong’s time and phrasing, his tone and spirit made him the most influential voice in 20th century American music. We’re appreciating the man the world came to know as Satchmo. Thousands of musicians and friends called him Pops. Our guest this hour, the cornet star Ruby Braff, always called him Louis.

Podcast • July 7, 2014

Wynton Marsalis on Louis Armstrong

“What we play,” Louis Armstrong said, “is life.” We’re learning that Louis Armstrong was not just the world’s greatest trumpet player, not just the most original and influential voice in jazz, not just the founding father of an American music with new forms and phrasing and feeling all indelibly marked by him; what’s seen and heard in perspective is that he was an actor and artist of range and depth, who shaped classic songs of American life as Dickens and Shakespeare formed classic characters of the English language.

In celebration of July 4th, we’re republishing this interview about Louis Armstrong, who is said to have been born on Independence Day, 1900. The second part of the conversation, with the trumpeter  Ruby Braff, is here.

“What we play,” Louis Armstrong said, “is life.” We’re learning that Louis Armstrong was not just the world’s greatest trumpet player, not just the most original and influential voice in jazz, not just the founding father of an American music with new forms and phrasing and feeling all indelibly marked by him; what’s seen and heard in perspective is that he was an actor and artist of range and depth, who shaped classic songs of American life as Dickens and Shakespeare formed classic characters of the English language.

Novelist Ralph Ellison heard a lyric poet in Louis Armstrong: “man and mask, sophistication and taste hiding behind clowning and crude manners — the American joke,” Ellison said. Our guest Wynton Marsalis hears in Louis Armstrong’s music “an undying testimony to the human condition in the America of his time.”

Podcast • June 25, 2014

A Lost 1996 Interview with David Foster Wallace

In February 1996, David Foster Wallace came to Boston. He was the not-quite recognized writer of the massive book, Infinite Jest, which was just beginning to capture the attention of reviewers, readers and a generation of writers. Chris interviewed David Foster Wallace on The Connection on WBUR in Boston, and told him he seemed to be living in between a moment of cultish obscurity and international artistic celebrity, perhaps even immortality.

By Kunal Jasty and Max Larkin

In February 1996, David Foster Wallace came to Boston. He was the not-quite recognized writer of the massive book, Infinite Jest, which was just beginning to capture the attention of reviewers, readers and a generation of writers. Chris interviewed David Foster Wallace on The Connection on WBUR in Boston, and told him he seemed to be living in between a moment of cultish obscurity and international artistic celebrity, perhaps even immortality. We went to the WBUR archives yesterday to see if we could find the tape.

We found it in the dusty basement, nestled between shows about the 1996 presidential primaries and escalating violence in the Middle East. The conversation is almost heartbreaking to hear now in light of Wallace’s suicide in 2008. Back then he was attempting to explain the sadness he saw among the twenty- and thirty-somethings around him; he admitted to feeling lost and lonely himself. But he also spoke of his hope to have children and the prospect of a long career.

I was raised in an academic environment and in a pretty middle-class one. I’d never really seen how a lot of other people live. My chance to see that was here in Boston, and a lot of it was in the halfway houses for this book. I didn’t really understand emotionally that there are people around who didn’t have enough to eat, who weren’t warm enough, who didn’t have a place to live, whose parents beat the hell out of them regularly. The sadness isn’t in seeing it, the sadness is in realizing how phenomenally lucky I am, not only to have never been hungry or cold, but to be educated, to have access to books. Never before in history has a country been so blessed, materially and intellectually, and yet we’re miserable.
David Foster Wallace in conversation with Chris Lydon, February 1996.

All the same, Wallace was skirting the subject of his own alcoholism and marijuana addiction. Now we know that Wallace came to Alcoholics Anonymous and Granada House, a halfway house in Brighton, not as a researcher but as a patient. In our show, “Infinite Boston,” we spoke to Deb Larson-Venable, Granada House’s den mother and executive director. Wallace based his character Pat Montesian, one of the novel’s rare angels, on Larson. She knew Wallace as a man who fought for his life in Boston, and won. You can listen to the full interview at the top of the page, but here’s our favorite part, when Wallace talks about why his generation seems so “lost and lonely”:

When I started the book the only idea I had is I wanted to do something about America that was sad but wasn’t just making fun of America. Most of my friends are extremely bright, privileged, well-educated Americans who are sad on some level, and it has something, I think, to do with loneliness. I’m talking out of my ear a little bit, this is just my opinion, but I think somehow the culture has taught us or we’ve allowed the culture to teach us that the point of living is to get as much as you can and experience as much pleasure as you can, and that the implicit promise is that will make you happy. I know that’s almost offensively simplistic, but the effects of it aren’t simplistic at all. I don’t have children but I’m sort of obsessed with the idea of what my children will think of me, of what we’ve done with what we’ve been given, and why we are so sad.
David Foster Wallace in conversation with Chris Lydon, February 1996.

In this clip, Wallace reads one of our favorite sections of the book, about why the seemingly trivial lessons of Boston AA simply work:

“You ask the scary old guys How AA Works and they smile their chilly smiles and say Just Fine. It just works, is all; end of story. The newcomers who abandon common sense and resolve to Hang In and keep coming and then find their cages all of a sudden open, mysteriously, after a while, share this sense of deep shock and possible trap; about newer Boston AAs with like six months clean you can see this look of glazed suspicion instead of beatific glee, an expression like that of bug-eyed natives confronted suddenly with a Zippo lighter. And so this unites them, nervously, this tentative assemblage of possible glimmers of something like hope, this grudging move toward maybe acknowledging that this unromantic, unhip, clichaed AA thing–so unlikely and unpromising, so much the inverse of what they’d come too much to love– might really be able to keep the lover’s toothy maw at bay. The process is the neat reverse of what brought you down and In here: Substances start out being so magically great, so much the interior jigsaw’s missing piece, that at the start you just know, deep in your gut, that they’ll never let you down; you just know it. But they do.

And then this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee is so lame you just know there’s no way it could ever possibly work except for the utterest morons . . . and then Gately seems to find out AA turns out to be the very loyal friend he thought he’d had and then lost, when you Came In. And so you Hang In and stay sober and straight, and out of sheer hand-burned-on-hot-stove terror you heed the improbable-sounding warnings not to stop pounding out the nightly meetings even after the Substance-cravings have left and you feel like you’ve got a grip on the thing at last and can now go it alone, you still don’t try to go it alone, you heed the improbable warnings because by now you have no faith in your own sense of what’s really improbable and what isn’t, since AA seems, improbably enough, to be working, and with no faith in your own senses you’re confused, flummoxed, and when people with AA time strongly advise you to keep coming you nod robotically and keep coming, and you sweep floors and scrub out ashtrays and fill stained steel urns with hideous coffee, and you keep getting ritually down on your big knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a burnished shield against all who would ask aid of it–how can you pray to a `God’ you believe only morons believe in, still?–but the old guys say it doesn’t yet matter what you believe or don’t believe, Just Do It they say, and like a shock-trained organism without any kind of independent human will you do exactly like you’re told, you keep coming and coming, nightly”

And here’s Deb Larson from our recent show on David Foster Wallace, describing Wallace at the Granada House in 1989. She describes his interactions with Don Gately and other residents of Granada House, bringing them to poetry readings at Harvard: