Brian Eno’s Instrumental Reworking of Songs

Brian Eno (photograph by Cecily Eno, courtesy of Sacks & Co.)

One of the earliest articles I wrote this year involved Verve’s release of Brian Eno’s 22nd studio album entitled FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE. The tracks on this album were vocal, written by Eno. On two of the tracks, the text involve his working with his daughter Darla; and on another track he partnered with Jon Hopkins.

He decided that he would follow up this release with a second album on which the ten tracks were given entirely instrumental renditions. The title of each of the instrumental tracks was given an abbreviation of the title of the corresponding vocal track. The new album was entitled, appropriately enough, FOREVER VOICELESS. It was scheduled for sale as a vinyl record to acknowledge Record Store Day, which is today.

Sadly, the hyperlink provided by the press release seemed to involve only the digital version. Furthermore, Amazon.com created a Web page consisting of 20 tracks, with the ten tracks of FOREVER VOICELESS following those of FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE. That Web page was created yesterday, and I have yet to succeed in finding a viable Web page for any physical version. Fortunately, my own resources allowed me to created separate playlists for the two albums.

I have no idea whether Eno himself had any “listening strategies” in mind for these two releases. From a purely personal point of view, I happen to prefer the instrumental version. However, that is just because I prefer to dwell on the “semantics of the music” (whatever that may mean!) rather than directing my perception at what the vocals are trying to say. Nevertheless, I expect that, some afternoon when I feel adventurous, I will set myself up to for side-by-side listening to each of the individual tracks. My conjecture is that the instrumental versions will serve as responses to the “call” of the texts being sung, but what those responses signify definitely remains to be seen (or heard)!

A New Release from Brian Eno

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Sacks & Co.)

This past October Verve released Brian Eno’s 22nd solo studio album. I first became aware of Eno in the early eighties, when I was living in Connecticut and spending all of my free time in New York City. I quickly became a faithful listener to John Schaefer’s radio program New Sounds, through which I learned that Eno was a prodigious polymath, experimenting with approaches to minimalism when he was not working on production projects with David Bowie. One of my greatest regrets was giving up the Working Backwards: 1983-1973 box set, which never made the transition from vinyl to digital.

The new release, FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, is Eno’s 22nd studio album and his first since Reflection, which came out in 2017. On this release Eno is joined once again by his brother Roger, as well as by his daughter Darla and his niece Cecily. However, if some of the performers are basically “newcomers,” the accompaniment to Eno’s lyrics still captures many of his “ambient” tropes. However, if his past work often evoked sinister tropes of alienation, he is now directing his “dark rhetoric” to the current climate crisis and the frustrating inaction on the part of those with the power to change prevailing conditions.

Personally, I continue to be a pessimist when it comes to climate issues. It is hard for me to avoid recalling one of the most cynical British tropes: “I’m all right, Jack; screw you all!” No one is “all right” these days; but those that prefer denial are certainly doing a first-rate job of exercising it. So, while I sympathize with Eno for his position and the rhetorical devices he can evoke, I fear that any “message” in the tracks on this new release are unlikely to have any positive effect.

Steve Jobs without the Hagiography

I was wondering whether or not The New York Review of Books would select Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs for consideration and, if so, whom would be assigned the task.  The answer can be found in the latest issue (January 12), in which Sue Halpern is the designated reviewer.  Anyone who takes the trouble to search for Halpern’s name on this site knows that I have a high opinion of her.  When she writes about the objective world of science and technology, she always seems to equip herself with enough background to make it clear that she is speaking from an informed position, rather than just relaying the canned assertions of others.  She then has a knack for projecting her “objective content” into both subjective and social worlds, meaning that she is better equipped to discuss implications and consequences than the usual crowd of evangelists, not to mention many of the more emotional nay-sayers.

By now most people know the basic backstory behind Isaacson’s biography.  Basically, he was hand-picked by Jobs to write the “authorized” account.  Given the single-minded focus Jobs could apply to just about anything he did, one wonders how this selection process occurred.  Did Jobs draw up a “short list,” which, after considerable deliberation, was finally whittled down to a single individual?  My own guess is that this is not likely, particularly since one of the prevailing themes of the book concerns his preference for gut-level decision-making.  That being the case, there is a good chance that Jobs’ gut was informed by browsing the biography section of a physical bookstore, where he would discover that there was this author with reputable credentials, who had already written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.  One can almost hear Jobs’ gut shouting out, “That’s the guy for me!”

(I suppose it is possible that this scenario could play out through Amazon recommendations;  but I am not sure it would have as much appeal to the gut, so to speak.)

Yes, I know that sounds irreverent;  but then I have never been particularly interested in writing biography.  I figure that an obituary for some individual who has received comparatively little attention is about as far as I can go, even when the subject is someone who had been involved with a considerable chunk of my personal life.  So I do not have to worry as much about showing the same respect for my subject matter as any good biographer would.  Thus, Halpern is dispassionate enough to recognize hagiography when she reads it.  To her credit, however, she has come up with a balanced account that gives all of the virtues their due without disregarding many of the vices that tend to get ignored in “authorized” accounts (or, in Isaacon’s case, relatively quarantined).  In other words any reader who would like a well-written overview of Jobs’ accomplishments would probably be better off reading the few pages of Halpern’s review, rather than taking total immersion baptism in all 630 of Isaacson’s pages.

Nevertheless, after one has read Halpern’s opening paragraph, one has a clear sense that she is holding herself in check.  She is doing everything that a responsible reviewer should do, but her choices of words reveal that she has bottled up some very strong personal opinions.  Thus, as one works through her essay, one begins to wonder if she will ever uncork that bottle.

Those who dislike spoilers should probably stop right here, because the cork finally pops out in the last three paragraphs of the review.  They have been so artfully constructed that I cannot resist reproducing them:

Steve Jobs cried a lot. This is one of the salient facts about his subject that Isaacson reveals, and it is salient not because it shows Jobs’s emotional depth, but because it is an example of his stunted character. Steve Jobs cried when he didn’t get his own way. He was a bully, a dissembler, a cheapskate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator, and sometimes he was very nice. Isaacson does not shy away from any of this, and the trouble is that Jobs comes across as such a repellent man, cruel even to his best friend Steve Wozniak, derisive of almost everyone, ruthless to people who thought they were his friends, indifferent to his daughters, that the book is often hard to read. Friends and former friends speculate that his bad behavior was a consequence of being put up for adoption at birth. A former girlfriend, who went on to work in the mental health field, thought he had Narcissistic Personality Disorder. John Sculley, who orchestrated Jobs’s expulsion from Apple, wondered if he was bipolar. Jobs himself dismissed his excesses with a single word: artist. Artists, he seemed to believe, got a pass on bad behavior. Isaacson seems to think so, too, proving that it is possible to write a hagiography even while exposing the worst in a person.

The designation of someone as an artist, like the designation of someone as a genius, is elastic, and anyone can claim it for himself or herself and for each other. There is no doubt that the products Steve Jobs brilliantly conceived of and oversaw at Apple were elegant and beautiful, but they were, in the end, products. Artists, typically, aim to put something of enduring beauty into the world; consumer electronics companies aim to sell a lot of gadgets, manufacturing desire for this year’s model in the hope that people will discard last year’s.

The day before Jobs died, Apple launched the fifth iteration of the iPhone, the 4S, and four million were sold in the first few days. Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’s art.

I agree with Halpern about the elastic nature of the “artist” concept (as well as the “genius” concept).  Since I spend the better part of every day working on what I write about the performing arts for Examiner.com, I find that I use both of those words with extreme caution;  and I am always suspicious when the term is self-applied.  At the same time I appreciate that the connotation of the word “artist” need not be strictly positive.  I seem to recall at least one of my reading sources referring to Adolf Eichmann as an “artist of extermination;”  but, even without such repugnant surface-level usage, history is filled with examples of dark perspectives.  There are any number of reasons (including the religion of my ancestors) why I cannot possibly imagine engaging in a conversation with Richard Wagner;  and I was certainly not surprised to read that Robert Schumann came away frustrated by his attempt to do so.

Still, the thing about Wagner is that we can judge him by what he did, rather than who he was.  Halpern has saved her strongest feelings about what Jobs did for her final paragraph.  The bottom line is that everything he accomplished was done in the service of the addictive powers of consumerism, which I continue to associate with both how we got into our current economic crisis and why our prospects for recovery are so bleak.  When we add to that the impact of Jobs’ activities on both the global environment and working conditions in some of the most destitute parts of the world, that Eichmann comparison seems a bit less absurd, even if it remains distasteful.  The idea that Apple may be guilty of crimes against humanity may be too extreme to stand up under rigorous argumentation;  but sometime it makes sense to follow Brian Eno’s “oblique strategy” of withdrawing from an extreme position, rather than being too weak to recognize that it is a position at all.

Recovering the Progressive Agenda

The article “Where Do We Go from Here?” by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells in the current (January 13) issue of The New York Review appears to have been completed on December 16, a good half month before the House gavel was passed and the Tea Party first flexed its muscles by requesting a reading of the Constitution (from which passages not to their liking were omitted).  Nevertheless, since the sabers have begun to rattle over undoing health care reform, the question posed by this article is extremely timely.  My personal feeling is that we need to revive what I have previously called “the Neustadt-May thinking-in-time approach to dealing with crisis situations,” which begins by asking of the particular crisis situation “How did we get into this mess?”  Fortunately, Krugman and Wells use their final paragraph to provide a way to think about this question:

In 2008, progressives fell for the fantasy of hope and change on the cheap; they believed Obama’s promise that the reforms America needed could float through on a tide of bipartisan reconciliation. It was not to be, and clinging to that illusion will only lead to more defeats. If progressives want to rebound, they’ll have to fight.

I am not sure I would agree with that “on the cheap” qualifier;  but I definitely endorse the use of the noun “fantasy.”  On the day after the last Election Day, I was not so polite.  I described those progressives as “the deluded masses who rallied behind Barack Obama blinded by a vision of secular Messianism;”  and I see no reason to soften my tone.  Indeed, that sharper tone is the one that now advocates serious attention to the key recommendation made by Krugman and Wells:

Democrats need to make it clear that if Obama isn’t going to be the leader of the Democratic agenda—and all indications are that he can’t or won’t—they will advance that agenda anyway, with or without his help. They have to be ready to delink their political fate from Obama, and make it clear that they won’t tolerate further undermining of their goals by deluded calls for bipartisanship. Progressive groups—MoveOn, for example—helped put Obama in office by mobilizing their members and followers through a variety of organizational strategies, including use of the Internet. They did so only to be ignored and dismissed once the 2008 election was won, and now they need to be revived.

One way to approach this recommendation is by revisiting my “favorite from Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies,” which is “Go to an extreme, come part way back.”  We need leadership in both the House and Senate smart enough to recognize that you start by trying to go for all the marbles, because only then do you have the best chance of getting the ones you really want.  Fortunately, we have members of both legislative bodies who are not afraid of this bold strategy and can hang tough over just how far they are willing to concede “part way back.”  These members were the heroes of the debate over health care reform;  and, if they did not prevail, they at least held out a more realistic hope of getting something done than Barack Obama ever did.

If we really want to take Krugman and Wells seriously, then we need to make sure that such legislators are not sidelined.  On the Senate side we need to recognize someone like Bernie Sanders, who is never afraid to ask uncomfortable questions about who the beneficiaries really are and why those who deserve to benefit are being ignored.  Over in the House I would suggest that we have a “dynamic duo” in Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich, both of whom I recognized back in my chutzpah awarding days.  I have to confess that I figured I had better check the list on Wikipedia of the current membership of the House to make sure that those I have just recommended still had Congressional seats.  It was nice to see that Kaptur and Kucinich had consecutive entries under Ohio, 9 and 10;  and it was all the more amusing that they follow John Boehner in position 8.  To hijack Obama’s campaign rhetoric, yes, we can make sure that our voices get heard;  but let’s make sure we find the right people in Washington to speak for us!

SOURCE Nostalgia

Every now and then I like to wax nostalgic over how the Downtown Music Gallery has helped me find the CDs to replace some of the more valued vinyls that I had to give up upon moving into smaller quarters.  In the past I have focused on Brian Eno’s Obscure series;  but lately, due in part to my writing on Examiner.com about The San Francisco Tape Music Festival, I have found myself listening to the CD collection that replaced the vinyl records included with selected issues of Source magazine.  I first learned about Source in the summer of 1968.  I have previously described this summer as “the first time I did any serious writing about [Merce] Cunningham's approach to choreography and John Cage's approach to the composition and performance of music,” although it was from Gordon Mumma, who worked with Cage and David Tudor in providing the music for performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, that I first learned about Source.  Mumma had a keen sense of signal processing, how he wanted to use it, and how he could build circuits to satisfy his goals;  so he provided me with many wonderful opportunities to converse about music and technology.  He was the one who encouraged me to subscribe to Source;  and eventually I managed to acquire a complete set of all published issues (something I still wish I could have done with Die Reihe), which I continue to treasure.

Source was one of the best channels for content about avant-garde music for its time.  It included articles, interviews, and scores.  It provided me with my first opportunity to examine the score for Cage’s 4’33”.  It also facilitated my reflections on my first serious encounter with the avant-garde through a performance given by the Sonic Arts Group, which had emerged from the ONCE Group and would late be known as the Sonic Arts Union.  (Under that name they give a performance at the Guggenheim Museum in a series that also offered me my first exposure to the music of Philip Glass.)

Six ten-inch vinyls were included in selected issues of Source during the run of the magazine.  There was an emphasis on in-concert recordings of what, at the time, was called “live electronic music,” conceived with an emphasis on performance, rather than conception.  However, with the Tape Music Festival about to begin on Friday, I find myself thinking back on “I am sitting in a room,” by Alvin Lucier.  Among the avant-garde composers, Lucier was “geographically closest” when I first got to know him, since he was running the Electronic Music Studio at Brandeis University when I was doing my doctoral research in computer music at MIT.

Thanks to WikiProject Classical music, “I am sitting in a room” has its own Wikipedia entry;  and it deserves it.  Lucier conceived it to deal with his stuttering.  It begins with a tape recording of his reading his own speaking voice, describing what he is doing and occasionally impeded by stutters.  He then began a repetitive process of recording that tape on another tape, doing the same with the resulting tape, and so on “through many generations,” as Lucier described the process in Source.  What happens is that the physics of the room gradually enhances certain resonant frequencies, making the source text less and less intelligible.  However, while the frequencies of the vocal formants give way to the resonant frequencies of the room, the rhythm of the speech endures, meaning that the rhythms of the stutters begin to articulate the sounds of the frequencies imposed by the room.  This is a gradual process, so listening requires more than a little patience.  However, the phenomenon leads to interesting effects that the patient will find rewarding.  I am not sure I would call this work a “classic;”  but it is one that deserves the attention of anyone aspiring to be a serious listener.

A Bit of Early John Adams History

In covering the first stage of this season’s Project San Francisco concerts at Davies Symphony Hall, organized by the San Francisco Symphony, for which John Adams was composer-in-residence, I gave considerable attention to the Inside Music Talk that former SF Classical Music Examiner Scott Foglesong gave for the Symphony performances of Adams’ “Harmonielehre.”  Foglesong seems to share my conviction that experiences are much more memorable when they are personalized.  Indeed, I myself took that personalized approach  in my Examiner.com review of the performance of Adams’ chamber music.  I felt that the scope of his repertoire could be examined in the context of his mindset;  and I offered the premise that, because I was almost exactly six months older than Adams, I could claim some appreciation of that mindset.  Similarly, Foglesong could establish a context for discussing Adams’ work by virtue of his having been Adams’ student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music back when Adams was first finding his voice as a composer.

Foglesong’s approach reminded me that I actually had an audio document from that period, and it came from a rather unlikely source.  Indeed, the only reason I have that document is because it came from a time when I was voraciously trying to get hold of any recording of the music of Gavin Bryars that existed.  This was before Bryars made his first appearance on a recording in the ECM New Series, when the only sources of his music were in Brian Eno’s Obscure series;  and I shall always be grateful to the Downtown Music Gallery for making it possible for me to find the CDs that replaced those Obscure vinyls that had been so hard to obtain.

Most of them had only a single Bryars selection, which meant that they provided the opportunity to learn about other composers previously unknown to me.  One of the records had the title Ensemble Pieces.  Bryars’ “1, 2, 1-2-3-4” was the last track in an album that included two pieces by Christopher Hobbs, “Aran” and “McCrimmon will Never Return.”  The remaining tracks were devoted to a three-movement suite by John Adams (whose name I barely recognized at the time) entitled American Standard.  Reviewing that CD I now see that those tracks were taken from a live performance by The New Music Ensemble of The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which took place in March 23rd, 1973!

I know of no other recording of American Standard in its entirety.  The middle movement has become relatively well known since it was recorded by the San Francisco Symphony when Edo de Waart was the conductor.  The notes for the Obscure recording stated that a conductor is “not necessary.”  The impression I get from those notes is that the suite was originally conceived to be as much a theater piece as a musical one.  Now I find myself wondering whether or not anyone might work up the motivation to revive American Standard in its entirety with a bit more of an effort to restore the spirit in which it was first created.

Misclassifying Werner Pirchner

The Grove Music Online entry for Werner Pirchner by Sigrid Wiesmann cites the print source for information about him to be the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Oddly enough, this entry fails to mention that Pirchner died on August 10, 2001, which is one of the few useful pieces of information in his Wikipedia entry. A more extensive account (for those who can read German) may be found in his German Wikipedia entry. However, Wiesmann probably establishes the best context for listening to his compositions:

Self-taught as a composer and vibraphone player, he followed the latest trends in jazz music as a youth. Later influences included the theories of Schoenberg, and the music of composers from Bach, Schubert and Bartók to Thelonious Monk and John Cage.

This raises the question of, notwithstanding the influences of youth and the presence of Monk in that list, why the Grove editors choose to classify him as jazz.

My only encounter with Pirchner was in the mid-Eighties. This was a time when I was willing to take a chance on almost anything released through the ECM New Series collection. ECM had put out my first purchase of the music of Gavin Bryars on CD (at a time when I thought the only sources of his music were in Brian Eno's Obscure series); and they were responsible for my "discovery" of Arvo Pärt, after having heard his name dropped by Steve Reich. I suppose I had as much trust in any production decision that Manfred Eicher made as jazz buffs of an earlier generation had in the tastes of Alfred Lion's Blue Note releases.

ECM's Pirchner release was a 2-CD set entitled EU, which was not so much an integrated suite as a representative sample from Pirchner's "PWV" catalog. (His use of that label, which appears only in the German Wikipedia entry, immediately identifies his sense of humor. Perhaps the primary influence from Cage was Cage's famous "sunny disposition.") The title presumably referred to the European Union, which was still far from the reality that would be established by the Maastricht Treaty but was on every "right-thinking" European's mind. On the other hand, when one listens to the music in this collection, one is easily convinced that Pirchner also chose this title for its diphthong, which, depending on the national speaker, could sound like a wail of indigestion or an expletive of disgust. Pirchner was that kind of guy. the sort who could easily come up with the title (translated into English) "String Quartet for Wind Quintet" but still had enough respect for convention to actually score the work for wind quintet (rather than, for example, brass quintet, thus covering all bases).

This is clearly not the sort of work we associate with the jazz category. On the other hand it is the sort of thing that probably makes too many serious listeners cringe, even if the members of the wind quintet on the ECM recording all came from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Having just written an Examiner.com piece on how challenging comedy can be, my personal feeling is that we just do not show enough respect to the truly skilled clowns. The problem is that those who insist on categories do not know what to make of Spike Jones, Hoffnung Festival Concerts, and P. D. Q. Bach; and yet, as has been the case since Aristophanes, the clowns often tell us more about the more serious aspects of our behavior than the more "acceptable" composers do.

I did not know until I started to work on this piece that Pirchner was dead and that it will not be long before we come up on the tenth anniversary of his death. Since he was born in 1940, his death came early (and not even the German Wikipedia entry says anything about its circumstances). The good news is that EU is apparently still available; and, according to Amazon.com, it is available on CD, vinyl, and through MP3 download. More interesting is that the Quintett Wien has released a recording (again both CD and MP3 download) of Streichquartett für Bläserquintett, which also includes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 388 serenade. This should be enough to convince the Grove editors that they have tried to cram Pirchner into the wrong box!

Recovering Ambience

Thanks to the good graces of the Downtown Music Gallery, I have been recovering several instances of favorite material that I had given up when I got rid of all of my vinyls. Many of those recordings were produced by Brian Eno as part of his Ambient and Obscure series, and some of them are real gems. For example it was from the Obscure series that I first discovered the music of Gavin Bryars; and, when I finally had an opportunity to talk about this with Bryars himself, I learned that he was the only person who had written to me directly to request a copy of my doctoral thesis (which I provided)!

There is a tendency to associate the "ambient movement" (to the extent that it was a movement) with Windham Hill Records, which, in turn, came to be viewed as the standard bearer for New Age music at its most vacuous. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for New Age music nicely captures this perspective:

New Age music is music of various styles, which is intended to create inspiration, relaxation, and positive feelings, often used by listeners for yoga, massage, inspiration, relaxation, meditation,^[1] and reading as a method of stress management^[2] or to create a peaceful atmosphere in their home or other environments often
associated with environmentalism and New Age spirituality.^[1]

From my own point of view, however, Eno had far less to do with New Age thinking and far more to do with advancing the philosophy of John Cage, who believed that, since there was no such thing as absolute silence, we could find things to listen to where we least expected to find them. Eno had a way of finding such listening experiences in places that even Cage had not considered looking. This emerged through his own compositions, through his collaborations with others (such as Harold Budd), and through his support of those who worked independently of his own activities. While Gavin Bryars was my prime example of this latter category, I discovered that one of the Obscure releases that included a Bryars composition also included the entirety of John Adams' three-movement American Standard suite (only one movement of which, "Christian Zeal and Activity," has ever been available through any other source). Now that I have settled in San Francisco and become a champion of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I take delight in the fact that Eno's release of Adams' music consists of a recording of a live performance by The New Music Ensemble of the Conservatory made on March 23, 1973.

I continue to listen to Eno's projects, particularly since they provide me with useful data points in my efforts to gain a better understanding of the nature of listening to music. I find that Eno found his own path from Cage by beginning with Cage's philosophy to take sounds just as we hear them and instead holding the acoustic equivalent of a magnifying glass to those sounds. This may involve repeated motifs in the spirit of Philip Glass (or, as I have observed, Ludwig van Beethoven); but it can also involve sounds that emerge of their own accord by nature of the audio equipment being used (an approach that can also be found in the music of composers such as Alvin Lucier). In either case the result, for me at least, has less to do with creating any kind of New Age "spiritual aura" and far more to do with focusing the mind on listening with a concentration that may well exceed the level of attention we give to Beethoven. What more can we ask of a composer?

Hanging Tough Pays Off

My favorite from Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies (this one is in the 1996 fourth edition) is "Go to an extreme, come part way back." It looks as if it may be Paul Wolfowitz' favorite, too! If the terms he set for his departure from the World Bank were extreme enough to warrant consideration for a second Chutzpah Award, it would appear that he did not have to come back very far. Al Jazeera English has provided a nice summary of how this affair was finally resolved:

Paul Wolfowitz has said he will resign as World Bank president at the end of June, ending a protracted battle over his leadership sparked by a promotion he arranged for his girlfriend.

The bank's board said it accepted that Wolfowitz had acted "in good faith" and acknowledged that "a number of mistakes were made by a number of individuals".

"He assured us that he acted ethically and in good faith ... and we accept that," it said.

The board said it was "grateful to Mr Wolfowitz for his service at the bank", adding that "much has been achieved in the last two years" – a move condemned by the bank's staff association.

Wolfowitz, 63, said he was pleased the board "accepted my assurance that I acted ... in what I believed were the best interests of the institution, including protecting the rights of a valued staff member".
Now, he said, it was in the best interest of the board that its mission "be carried forward under new leadership".

However, this is far from an and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after ending, at least from the World Bank's point of view:

The board said it was clear that "a number of mistakes were made by a number of individuals in handling the matter under consideration" and that there was a "need to review the governance framework of the World Bank Group, including the role as well as procedural and other aspects of the ethics committee".

In other words the World Bank seems to have concluded by closing the barn door after the horse was stolen, while Wolfowitz can enjoy the benefits of holding to his extreme position. Nevertheless, out of a sense that the award should be distributed fairly across the sample set, rather than concentrating on any single individual, I have decided that this weeks award should remain in the hands (so to speak) of the sex offenders.