gyokusai's posterous

Via Chris Clarke I found this unsettling blogpost “Microcredit’s Newest Victims” by Rahul Mahajan about the microlending business in India. His three major points: The commercialization of microlending, the social pressure microlenders inflict, and the neglect to facilitate structural change. 

The first point isn’t surprising. If there’s money to be made, people will try to make money, and if you have people trying to make money, some of them will want to make more money, regardless of the cost or effects on others. The second point, in contrast, came as a surprise but sounds frighteningly familiar. It evokes images of, like, organized crime or Sippenhaft:

Grameen Bank succeeded because of a focus on lending to women and through invocation of collective responsibility and mutual surveillance. Loans were made to women in a “circle,” all of whom were made responsible for repayment of the entire amount, and they were encouraged to pressure each other to make their payments. […] Microfinance organizations [create] this choking atmosphere of social pressure, which often seems to make default more difficult than it is for the rest of us. People go hungry to pay back the loans, their kids drop out of school to work to repay the loans and sometimes, horribly, they kill themselves.

The third point, again—“In truth, if no structural changes are made in the economy, what you’ll have is far too many vegetable vendors, bicycle repairers, etc. competing with each other until they drive profits down to zero and nobody can keep up with their 20% interest payments”—didn’t come as a surprise. Throwing money around, tweaking the rules, or even effecting laws won’t change anything, or can make a situation even worse, if it’s not accompanied by structural change. In her essay ““From Haverstock Hill Flat to U. S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory?” (2000), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak put it like this:

As long as we remain only focused on the visible violence of world trade, endorse the credit-baiting of the poorest rural women of the Southern hemisphere in the name of micro- enterprise without any infrastructural involvement, the subaltern remains in subalternity. And we legitimate the world trade coding of the finance capital market by reversal. (7)

Incredibly, this was ten years ago.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. “From Haverstock Hill Flat to U. S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory?” What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory. Eds. and introd. Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Thomas Kendell. New York: Routledge, 2000. 1–39.

At first listen, it’s hard to make up your mind where this ’72 debut album of the Australian band Buffalo stylistically belongs, except that it’s, well, early seventies. Led Zeppelin come to mind, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Steppenwolf, among others; not surprisingly, Buffalo was signed to Vertigo Records. What makes this album stand out is how it mixes a hard rock/blues rock core with progressive rock elements. Works great for me, but I can see that it might leave hard rockers not fully satisfied on the one hand, while it’s certainly not daring enough for full-fledged progrock on the other. Another thing that takes a while to sink in is the line-up: guitar, bass, drums, and two lead vocals. The album features two cover songs, Blues Image’s “Pay My Dues” and Free’s “I’m a Mover”; all other tracks are original titles. On the back of the album, it sez “Play this album LOUD!” which indeed you should. It’s not your easy-going, mellow lazy Sunday chill-out music.

This review was originally posted on RYM.

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Excellent performance, both vocal and instrumental. “O dulcis amor” is a well-balanced compilation of cloistered (Vittoria Aleotti, Caterina Assandra, Isabella Leonarda) and independent (Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi) composers from the 16th and early 17th century, of sacred and secular music, and of vocal and instrumental pieces. Highly recommended. 

As much as I appreciate this album, though, it griefs me that this is again a compilation. And yet you have to be thankful because even compilations of female composers from the Late Renaissance and Early Baroque are brazenly rare. Each of the featured composers—or Sessa, or Rusca, or Perucona, or Badalla, or Meda, to name a few—really deserve to have their own, dedicated albums recorded, like any male composer from that time. There’s a handful of dedicated recordings with music from Isabella Leonarda, Barbara Strozzi, and especially Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, but all of them together don’t amount to even a paltry dozen albums overall—compared to stacks and stacks of dedicated recordings with music from Tallis, de Lassus, Byrd, or Gesualdo. Hello performers, hello producers: it may be news for you, but even back then a penis was not a prerequisite to becoming a great composer.

This review was originally posted on RYM.

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Interestingly, the first concerto on this record, Mozart’s Double Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra No.10 in E flat major, K.365 (which Mozart wrote in 1779 shortly before leaving Salzburg and moving to Vienna), feels more “dialogical” than both Corea’s “Fantasy” or Gulda’s “Ping Pong,” both pieces for two pianos. Why that is the case, I can only guess—but my guess would be that there is a reason why, among other things, serious music is generally differentiated from other musical traditions by being notated, a characteristic that allows for more structural “deep linking” then picking up, and elaborating on, elements by ear and on the fly. The performance, overall, isn’t groundbreaking, but fun to listen to, and I enjoyed it very much.

Chick Corea’s “Fantasy for Two Pianos” is well-structured and strongly reminiscent of impressionist music with a dash of latin-flavored neoclassicism. Gulda’s “Ping Pong” hides some musically interesting ideas like eastereggs in a lot of clutter, sandwiched between two weighty stylistically frazzled manifestos.

This review was originally posted on RYM.

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While I remained largely unaffected by Supertramp’s two albums in between, both their Crime of the Century from ’74 and Breakfast in America from ’79 stunned me silly. Supertramp’s poptuneishness heralded some kind of second-generation-progrock, but what they were lacking in artistic credibility, they made up for with perfectly executed autopoietic nostalgia: a succession of melancholic dirges and elegies—with the “lost innocence/childhood” topos as a major constituent and the Wurlitzer electric piano as a vascular conduit—that mourned the loss of its own achievement. Resonated well with me.

This review was originally posted on RYM.

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Most songs are so-so, best cards in the pack are „Das Lied der Trennung“ K.519 and Schubert’s reply-song „Luisens Antwort“ D.319 (which is, thankfully, included in this collection). Too many of the songs, also, sound like remixes from Haydn recitatives. Both the soprano and tenor perform with a slight, continuous vibrato, which is both dubious for the period and unpleasant to the ear. Meanwhile, the piano’s too prominent and falls flat on its bottom.

This review was originally posted on RYM.

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