Month / December 2014

by Andrew

The best music I heard in 2014

Like the books list, this is my list of my favorite music that I heard for the (mostly) first time in 2014, not of things commercially released by the music industry in 2014. Generally I spend a lot more time listening to old music than new music, not because I don’t like new music but because I still don’t feel like I’ve listened to all the good stuff already out there. For a guide to newly-released music, you can’t do better than Ted Gioia’s — I still haven’t worked my way through the recordings he recommended from 2012. In no particular order, the music that stood out for me this year:

  • Jelly Roll Morton – Last Sessions: The Complete General Recordings. This is cheating a little bit, since I did not hear this for the first time in 2014, it’s been sitting in my house for years. But it didn’t make as much of an impression when I was first heard it. When I went back to it this year, it was,well, wow. The usual top-jazz-albums-of-all-time lists tend to name his Red Hot Peppers sessions as the must-hear classics, but I think these later recordings are probably more listenable for most people. For me their greatness comes from how they showcase Jelly as a fantastic blues singer, an aspect of his talents you will not hear on the early group recordings.
  • Bob Marley’s live albums. I came to reggae through the back door, so to speak, first getting interested in the more experimental dub side of things and then working my way into roots and more mainstream stuff. So I used to be somewhat sniffy about Bob Marley (“too popular”), an attitude I am now happy to completely reject: the songs are just good. The first Wailers album in particular is fantastic, but the live albums that I stumbled across this year are a revelation. Live! is the more famous recording, but Live At The Roxy may in fact be better — certainly the setting is closer and more intimate, less stadium rock. And I actually prefer the version of “No Woman No Cry” to the one on Live!, which everyone knows because it was included on the ubiquitous Legend compilation. The other great reggae I discovered this year was Israel Vibration’s The Same Song, a roots classic.
  • Warne Marsh – All Music. One of the truly unique voices on the tenor saxophone, who sounds utterly unlike any other jazz player (and how often is that really true?). This is probably my favorite of his recordings though pretty much all of them are worthwhile. In fact it’s another rediscovery — I picked up the LP many years ago at a library sale, but it’s been sitting unheard in a box since I’ve been living in China.
  • Exploding Star Orchestra – Sixty-Three Moons of Jupiter. I love everything this Chicago outfit has put out: they are the true contemporary heirs of Sun Ra and the free-jazz big-band concept he more or less invented. The latest recording is split between the big band work and a CD of leader Rob Mazurek’s electronic compositions. I’m not so into the electronic stuff, but the swinging polyphonic spree of the full orchestra has few equals on this planet.
  • Randy Weston – Little Niles and Highlife. I am a sucker for the African-themed jazz of the 1960s, not because it is really African but because invoking Africa was so often a great excuse to beef up the percussion, focus on rhythm, and generally break into new compositional territory. A series of Weston’s albums are now easily available as part of the Capitol Jazz Vaults MP3 reissue series, and these two were the ones that stood out: Little Niles has great tunes (the title track is a classic) and orchestration, while Highlife busts out the heavy percussion and horns.
  • Barney Wilen – Tilt. A great but largely lost album of 1950s mainstream jazz, played with startling confidence by the then very young French tenor sax star. I wrote more about Wilen here.
  • Fania All-Stars – Live At The Red Garter, Vol. 1 & 2. Kicking salsa recordings from the 1970s. Vol. 1 is the more consistent disc, but “Noche” on Vol. 2 is quite possibly the best Latin jazz track I have ever heard. This year I also went back and listened again to some other Latin jazz I had not heard in a while, and must give a plug to Sabu Martinez’ Jazz Espagnole album from 1958: truly fantastic, a peak of the genre.
  • Lee Konitz & Red Mitchell – I Concentrate On You. A very unlikely concept: Cole Porter songs played by a minimalist duo of alto sax and bass. But I found myself going back again and again to this recording for its pure, melodic beauty. This and other recordings are leading me inexorably to the view that Lee Konitz is one of the most consistently surprising and delightful saxophonists in jazz.
  • Khan Jamal. I love the vibes, but was not familiar with him until I came across two of his classics of the 1970s avant-garde: Drumdance to the Motherland, an indescribable mashup of vibes, guitar, dub echo techniques and freaky clarinet, and The River, a ravishing duet of Jamal on vibes and Bill Lewis on marimba, on the legendary lost Philly Jazz label. Only half of Drumdance is really listenable but that half is great fun, and The River is pure beauty.
  • The dB’s – Falling Off The Sky. An actual new release, just to mix things up. These are just legitimately great, catchy guitar-pop songs, but those are an impossibly rare commodity these days.
by Andrew

How to compete with state-owned enterprises

The WSJ has another good article about SOEs in China, this one focusing on Hainan Air’s efforts to compete with the three big state-owned airlines. Air transportation is one of China’s most state-dominated industries, with private-sector firms accounting for less than 10% of investment in the sector (but a somewhat larger share of passenger volume, according to the WSJ’s graphic). In manufacturing by contrast private firms account for 90% of capital spending.

private_sector_fai

So if we are going to see movement to a more liberalized economy in China, then what we should look for is signs of private firms getting more access in these state-dominated sectors. Hainan Air seems to be a pretty well-managed firm (I’ve always liked their service), and as the article shows has tried many different ways to break out of the ghetto of second-tier airports and routes that regulators have placed it in.

But the short version is that Chinese regulators are not bending over backwards to help a private-sector competitor. What this example shows is how the oligopoly of the three big carriers does not have to be mainly maintained by an explicit regulation or law, but can be enforced pretty effectively just through a series of discretionary government decisions. I suspect this is the case in a lot of China’s state-dominated sectors: SOE market power domination is not so much written into law as the result of an inherited industry structure and repeated government action to prevent change to that structure. Of course, there are also examples like the salt industry, where there are written regulations that will have to be changed if recent pledges to open it up to more competition are to be realized.

What this means is that liberalization is going to be hard work for China — it’s not simply a matter of repealing legislation that discriminates against private firms, but requires lots of detailed work to change entrenched practices and priorities in many different industries and parts of the bureaucracy. Personally, I think liberalizing these state-dominated service sectors is the most important economic reform that China could carry out. In contrast to signs of excess capacity in heavy industry, there are still obvious bottlenecks in delivery of many services, like healthcare. And given China’s now reasonably high incomes, a lot of the future growth in consumer spending is going to go to services. So shifting more investment into what should still be relatively high return sectors would help keep China’s overall growth rate from falling too sharply. But it’s not going to happen quickly or easily.

by Andrew

The third wave of culinary globalization

I’m going to develop a theory of the stages of culinary globalization, based on not much more than walking around and eating, so bear with me.

Let’s call the first wave the exchange of ingredients after 1492 — when New World plants were first incorporated into Old World cuisine (like introducing tomatoes to Italy, chili peppers to China). And the second wave the exchange of people — the great 19th and 20th century waves of immigration that shifted populations around, and meant that you could eat more than one country’s food in any given country (Thai restaurants in America, Italian restaurants in Japan). I would like to venture that we are now starting the third wave. Unfortunately I have not yet come up with the perfect catchphrase for this yet, but it’s something like the great recombination, or the remixing of cuisines.

The vanguard of this third wave are not your straightforward ethnic restaurants of the last wave. Rather, they are the products of the last wave: cuisines that have been transformed so much by their relocation to a second country, that they are now distinctive enough to be re-exported as a new cuisine all their own. I first noticed this trend when I walked by a Japanese hot-dog restaurant in Hong Kong a few years ago. Hot dogs are American. But no American would recognize what’s being served in this place: the hot dog has been transformed and reimagined. And now a Japanese hot dog is a distinct enough thing that it can go abroad on its own. There are three cultural layers in that restaurant: America / Japan / Hong Kong. Another example came last year wandering through a mall in Xiamen, where I spotted an ad for a “California-style” sushi restaurant. And indeed, we all know that California-style sushi is not quite the same thing as the Japanese original. Again three layers: Japan / America / China.

Today this was driven home to me again when my wife and I had lunch at a steak-and-salad-bar place in the neighborhood we just moved into. It was a lot like Sizzler: big steaks and lavish all-you-can-eat “salad” bar with a lot more than just salad. But it was not American at all: it was a branch of a Korean restaurant. So three layers: America / Korea / China. While there was plenty of Caesar salad and the usual suspects, there were also things that let you know you were not in Kansas anymore, like the blueberry pizza or the mix-your-own rice bowls. Again an American cuisine that has been subtly remixed (and probably improved) by passing through another culture. I can’t help but feel we are going to see a lot more of this culinary remixing. And I haven’t even tried the crazy Korean pizza place yet…

 

by Andrew

How strategic are China’s state firms?

Dinny McMahon of the WSJ has an excellent profile of a giant but obscure Chinese state-owned enterprise, Sinomach. I have been fascinated by SOEs since I first moved to China, and over the past couple of years I have also spent a lot of time digging into the finances and other technicalities of how the SOE sector works. Dinny’s piece nicely captures a lot of the key facts about the SOE sector today: 1) far from being world-straddling corporate giants, most Chinese SOEs are poorly performing companies suffering from a combination of arbitrary political goals and poor management; 2) a lot of “SOE reform” happened from 1998-2003, but not a lot has happened since, and there is a lot of room to further overhaul these companies — which indeed the government is now trying to do; 3) the government’s support for SOEs is based on the premise that they will develop “strategic” technologies to boost national security and competitiveness, but in fact the actual achievements in this area are decidedly subpar. (Those interested in more data and detail on these issues can look at the paper on SOE reform I wrote for the Paulson Institute.)

To close, here’s one lovely tidbit from the Sinomach story:

Despite China having passed through more than three decades of reform, Sinomach’s Erzhong unit—set up by China’s Red Army in 1958—still adheres to many of the traditional customs of the country’s major state-owned firms. It still pays retirees a living stipend, and runs a sports center with two swimming pools and a television station. Staples of the station’s programming, which is only available on the factory grounds and to people living in residential zones once owned by the company, include a U.S. English teaching program from the early 1990s and training programs for operating and repairing machinery and electrical equipment.

by Andrew

The best books I read in 2014

The list this year has more fiction than nonfiction: I read a lot of great novels this year, but the nonfiction was more hit-or-miss. In alphabetical order by author, since I can’t come up with a satisfying way of ranking them. I usually do a lot of reading in December, and am desperate to get back on my reading schedule after a month or more dealing with moving house and renovating, etc, so I may update this later if I finish something else quite good before Jan. 1.

Nonfiction

  • The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, by W. Brian Arthur. The rare book that delivers exactly what it promises in the title. These days we are constantly inundated with pronouncements, analyses and prognostications about technology and its impact on our lives. Yet for something so important, the general principles of how technology works are very poorly understood. There is an emptiness at the heart of many arguments about technology, which treat it as a mysterious separate universe whose inner laws can only by divined by the cognoscenti. Arthur cuts through the cant with brilliantly clear and simple prose, and logically and rigorously develops nothing less than a General Theory of Technology. We learn to see technologies not as isolated units — “fruits” plucked from a tree, be they low-hanging or high, in one popular metaphor — but as collections of elements that are constantly evolving and combining. Among other things, Arthur explains not only why modern technological progress, once started, is not going to stop, but also why that progress is never consistent or even. I found it tremendously refreshing and very insightful, and all in all an essential toolkit for understanding the world around us.
  • Invention of the Modern World, by Alan MacFarlane. An excellent entry into the crowded field of “how to explain the modern world” books. It attempts to answer the question of where the Industrial Revolution and modern life came from by a deep dive into the particulars of English history. MacFarlane is anthropologist by training, though he has spent most of his career not writing about the traditional societies that anthropologists (ahem) traditionally focus on. Fittingly, however, his argument is essentially anthropological: that the patterns of the modern technological economy reflect a particular social structure, and that England developed this social structure first for a variety of contingent but identifiable historical reasons. Very readable, thanks to its origins as a series of lectures for Chinese students, and while the England-as-origin-of-all-things thesis goes overboard occasionally, it is mostly pretty convincing.
  • Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, by William Janeway. A strange and not always terribly readable book, it was nonetheless one of the most thought-provoking I encountered this year, so makes the list. Janeway is a private-equity investor with an academic bent, and the book uses his own experience to develop general ideas on how innovation and technology work and are financed in the real world. Strangely, the detailed anecdotes about particular companies and technologies were mostly uninteresting, while the general reflections I found excellent (usually it is the other way around).
  • Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, by Keith Lowe. Not a fun read, but an engrossing and thoughtful one, and consistently fascinating. The book is essentially a survey of all the terrible things people in Europe did to each other after the end of official fighting. Much of the motivation and the value of the book is in just documenting these lesser-known events. But it also develops an argument that much of the so-called postwar political order that we take for granted–the Cold War, division of Germany, etc–was actually driven as much by the events after the cessation of formal hostilities in Europe as it was by the pattern of winners and losers.
  • Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II 1937-1945, by Rana Mitter, and Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta. This year I fortuitously read a great combination of new books on World War II from an Asian perspective: the first a reconsideration of China’s role in the world war, the second an account of how Japan’s (apparently highly dysfunctional) system decided to go to war against the US. Both are lively and very readable. Mitter argues for a more generous understanding of what Chiang Kai-shek accomplished by not losing the war against the Japanese invaders, where many previous accounts have emphasized his many failures. In particular Mitter says China’s contribution to the global balance of the war is underappreciated: by keeping hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops tied down in China, Chiang limited Japan’s ability to attack other countries and make the war in Asia even worse than it was. The book also has lots of great material from archives on the Chinese experience of the war, including a stunning description of the firebombing of Chongqing. Hotta’s book is a more straightforward narrative history of the runup to the attack on Pearl Harbor–which led to a war that many Japanese knew they could not win. There is a zone of silence at the core of the book, since the available sources just do not tell us enough about what the emperor and those around him were thinking at the time. But it is nonetheless a very useful portrait of how a political system made a series of disastrous decisions that led to its own undoing.

Fiction

  • The Broken Sword, by Poul Anderson. Now that the works of J.R.R. Tolkien have been transformed into multimedia mass-culture extravaganzas, it’s hard to remember a time when “fantasy” referred to anything other than variations on Tolkien’s themes. But The Broken Sword predates the commercial fantasy genre, and offers a glimpse at the road not taken. This book is slim and often grim, Nordic rather than Anglo-Saxon, and in many ways the antithesis of the epic and optimistic Lord of the Rings. It’s a work that, sadly, remains unique, having spawned no followers and no imitators.
  • Life after Life, by Kate Atkinson. One of the central facts of our lives is that they are contingent: we know that things could have happened otherwise. But they didn’t, and so we never really know what might have been. This extraordinary book explores this theme through the conceit of a woman who lives her life over and over again, making different choices and having different accidents, until she gets it “right.” But it’s not the sterile working-out of an abstract philosophical concept, but a concrete, charming and often funny story. The depiction of how the same girl grows up into several very different people is brilliantly true. Hands down the best novel I read in 2014, and criminally overlooked by the various prize-giving outfits.
  • Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. What would you do if your childhood friend, the one you played videogames and smoked pot with, grew up and decided to kill off most of humanity? I don’t think you would handle it all that well, and the shattered protagonist of this book has plenty of problems. I’ve always had a weakness for life-among-the-ruins post-apocalypse stories, but a wonderful voice and storytelling structure set this one apart and make it truly literary. After reading this, you will want to read Atwood’s two sequels — the last one, MaddAddam, came out this year — but while enjoyable they do not achieve the same hallucinatory power.
  • An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris. A novelization of the Dreyfus affair that, like Harris’ previous historical novels, is among the classiest of page-turners. It is no mean feat to make a suspenseful novel about events that are so widely known, but he has managed it. The contemporary resonance of the events is clear but not overdone.
  • Euphoria, by Lily King. As a former anthropologist, how could I resist a novel based on the relationship between Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson? While I had to read it for these reasons, the rest of you should read it since it is purely a good book. The description of the anthropologists’ fieldwork among the New Guinea tribes rings true, the love story is poignant, and the writing about the joys of intellectual endeavor (the euphoria of the title) is brilliant. It falls apart a bit with an implausible plot twist at the end, but is otherwise thoroughly enjoyable.
  • Submergence, by J.M. Ledgard. A spy is taken hostage in Somalia; a marine biologist ponders the mysteries of existence. The yoking together of two such radically different narratives is occasionally too stylized, but the writing is good and so closely observed as to make up for it, especially in the Somalia scenes. And unlike so much literary fiction it feels deeply interested in real things happening in the world. Runner up in the literary-fiction-set-in-Africa category: The Laughing Monsters, by Denis Johnson.
  • The Last Picture Show, by Larry McMurtry. The classic novel of small-town life and its limits. I also grew up in a small, isolated town, and while my life was nothing like this, the portrait is true and spare. I also read McMurty’s Horseman, Pass By this year, which has the same setting and some similar themes, but this is better.
  • American Splendor, by Harvey Pekar. Sadly, I can’t claim to be cool enough to have read this before the movie came out. But I loved the movie, and reading the original comics has been on my to-do list for a long time, and I’m very glad to have finally done it. The tagline is “ordinary life is pretty complex stuff,” and you have to admire how aggressively Pekar mines banal interactions with coworkers and others for his material. It does not always work, and some of the later pieces are too self-absorbed, but the best moments are a true and deeply personal artistic achievement.
  • We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas. The sample first chapters on the Kindle version hooked me with a promise of a lyrical but closely observed portrait of Irish immigrants in the 1950s. Bait-and-switch: the book turns into something completely different along the way, much in the way that actual life does. Most of the novel is a heartbreakingly clear portrait of age and infirmity. Perhaps longer than it absolutely needed to be, but I never regretted the time spent on these pages.
  • Shaman, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Yes, it’s a novel about “primitive” life in the Ice Age. And yes, it’s actually good. Unlike almost any of the other attempts to imagine this part of human history, Robinson’s depictions of early tribal life are realistic, plausible and moving. And the nature writing is fantastic. Compelling and truly original.