A Phlaming Phoenix

  • 0 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle
  • I don’t pretend to know how to accomplish this. I may be completely wrong here, but two things that have to go:

    • Religious thought (“faithbrain” or the Peter Pan-esque belief that things are true because you believe they are true, despite a lack of evidentiary or even argumentative support, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary)
    • Social media bubbles (billionaires controlling the content people see, creating bubbles of “information” that skew the public in their favor)

    There’s almost certainly more to do as well, but those things stand out to me. Also, it seems hard to believe that we could make any progress on these fronts given the current situation.





  • Isn’t the core of jazz improvisation and breaking the “rules” of music? If that’s what they’re doing, why would we disqualify it as jazz? A lot of folks had this opinion of Miles Davis doing jazz fusion in the 70s on Bitches Brew and Live/Evil with his squeaky, borderline abusive trumpeting, or of Herbie Hancock doing weird space synth stuff on Sextant and funk fusion on Headhunters. I don’t see how what you’re saying isn’t just gatekeeping that’s not really in the spirit of jazz.


  • Awful take. Last weekend I saw Mike Dillon with Phunkadelick playing with Brian Haas on the Rhodes organ. They played a wild punk-jazz show that is one of the best shows I’ve ever attended. There was a mosh pit at a jazz concert where a primary instrument was a vibraphone.

    In recent years, I’ve greatly enjoyed things like AKU!'s album Blind Fury (drum/trumpet/baritone sax trio) and Ambrose Akinmusire’s Origami Harvest. A lot of modern jazz is blending in electronic influences, like Sungazer. Maybe you don’t like these things, but I can’t imagine calling jazz dead.















  • In general, I agree. I’ll add two things:

    • Android allows you to use third party launchers if you don’t like the one that comes with your phone. I use Nova Launcher, for instance. I’m not an Apple person, but to my knowledge that’s either not possible or a pain to do on an iPhone. It also lets me buy from different Android device manufacturers and keep a consistent UI across all of them.
    • Android has some serious UX issues in a few places. The one that gets me the most is when you share something. The interface you get differs based on the source app, sometimes only has a handful of visible options with no sorting or recency options, and it hides the fact that’s you can scroll to see more, but never more than about four at a time.

    Still, I’ll take it over an iPhone any day.