Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 80

Só Danço Samba. A cliché, but no less perfect for that...

Francis Bator, RIP

His article “The Simple Analytics of Welfare Maximization” (1957) presents the graphical version of basic welfare economics that many of us have taught to our undergrad intermediate micro students pretty much ever since. I doubt that it's been improved upon.

Taking a quick look after many years, the following passage from Bator's discussion of the utility-possibility frontier (p. 28) jumped out at me:

To designate a single best configuration we must be given a Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function that denotes the ethic that is to "count" or whose implications we wish to study. Such a function– it could be yours, or mine, or Mossadegh's, though his is likely to be non-transitive– is intrinsically ascientific.

The only "Mossadegh" I know of is Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was the prime minister of the democratically-elected Iranian government that was overthrown in 1953 with the help of the CIA, to be succeeded by the Shah. Given that non-transitive amounts to irrational, is this a racist dig, or am I missing something?

Bator was very clear on the importance of distributional questions, as well as market failures due to externalities and non-convexities. Yet the beauty of the efficiency properties of markets under ideal conditions easily distracts our attention from these problems, as if they were second-order. For this reason, the very effectiveness of his masterly exposition may have contributed to the tendency of well-trained economists toward free-market ideology. We can give Bator himself the last word here: "The Pareto conditions are necessary, but never sufficient" (p. 58).

Trouble in Paradise

The title makes no sense at all, but this 1932 Ernst Lubitsch comedy is justifiably considered a great one. Pre-Code, it is full of good-natured sexual chemistry and innuendo. The cast is great, the dialogue witty, the scenes well-paced. We saw it last night at the Stanford Theatre, where it played in December 1932 along with a vaudeville program. That must have been a fun night out.

They Feed They Lion

Written 50 years ago.

Gin

One of the funniest poems I know of, but also wistful and sad and, in the era of Trump, depressing, because the simple wisdom of Levine's coming of age story is lost on the boy-men who never came of age and now run our country.

.... Ahead
lay our fifteenth birthdays,
acne, deodorants, crabs, salves,
butch haircuts, draft registration,
the military and political victories
of Dwight Eisenhower, who brought us
Richard Nixon with wife and dog.
Any wonder we tried gin.

The Poetry of Jazz

I heard a segment about this collaboration of the late poet Philip Levine and jazz musician-composer Benjamin Boone yesterday on NPR. I have been a fan of Levine's poems for a while... Boone's music was a revelation. I was able to listen to about half of the album on Spotify yesterday before heading out to dinner, and it had me in tears. Levine was in his mid-80s when he recorded it, and he sounds old, but not at all antiquated. There is very little artifice in his readings, but there is understated musicality and energy... the jazz of poetry is in the words on paper but also in his voice. The selection of poems is wonderful, ranging from Levine's gritty depictions of the working life from his days in Detroit, to celebrations of jazz, to his lyrical songs to the California Central Valley– in fact it was at Fresno State that he met Boone.

As for Boone's settings of the poems, they are, so far, perfection– this is not your father's beat poetry recited to a bongo and bass, but full-on modern jazz composition. Boone recruited some of the top musicians in jazz to take a solo– or should I say a stanza?– on several tracks: Tom Harrell, Branford Marsalis, Greg Osby, and Chris Potter among them.

Wonderful.

Sierra Vista

My friends from Mountain View (get it?) suggested a Sunday hike at Sierra Vista, a preserve in the foothills east of East San Jose. I'd never been there. My first impression was... meh... exposed grassy hills with plenty of cow patties... commanding views of the Bay Area were a plus, but those can be had elsewhere as well.

Things improved decidedly when we set off down the Kestrel Trail on the ridge above Upper Penitencia Creek, a rugged canyon lined with classic California chaparral.  Highlights for me included my first (to my knowledge) sighting of Lindley's blazingstar (Mentzelia lindleyi), a spectacular wildflower growing in abundance in places along the steep slope; gooseberries in the shade of an old oak; rock outcroppings made of thick layers of fossilized mollusks; and– yeah, you know– some excellent lichens.

"Testilying" in reality and fiction

This NY Times article about cops cutting corners or flat-out lying to get a conviction should offer no surprises to readers of crime fiction or students of human nature. I just finished reading Denise Mina's fine The Red Road, the plot of which turns on an egregious example of testilying. Mina is a great writer of crime novels for a number of reasons, including her command of the language, plotting and pacing, ability to get inside the heads of her characters, and sympathy for the bad guys as well as the good guys. Sympathy, that is, with one pretty consistent exception: She– like her detective hero Alex Morrow– has no sympathy for the testilying cop. In the interest of fictional even-handedness, perhaps she should. In the interest of justice, she cannot.