Choice Cuts

He inspired them, neither by authority nor devine right, but by representing the simple and pure aspirations of their youth and by persuading them, by his own example, that these aspirations could be realized in the national struggle for unity and indulgence. What the nation found sacred in him was^a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size.
^WHO declares swine flue global pandemic^?
[There is a line of volcanic terraforms stretching from central northern california through upper middle Oregon. sisters bend.] ^This happens when an inherited world-view is unable to contain or resolve emotions or intuitions provoked by a new situation or extremity of experience unforseen.^mysteries destroy it by providing the basis for a new world view.
[Heirarchy of value based on fineness subverted by cleverness modifying utility.]
^Thus the uncurious and sluggish Drowsians missed the fact that the supposed grandson of the supposed paralytic did not grow as the years went by, and that his flaxen hair was nothing but an admirable wig; for the Potato Elf had begun to go bald at the very outset of his new existence. Otherwise he had not much changed: his tummy, perhaps, had grown plumper, and purple veins showed on his dingier, fleshier nose.^ Twilight at Drowse was particularly blurry and blue, softening>the blue-haired women of our mountaim tribes when, abandoned by a lover, every morning, with a persistant pressure of brown fingers on the turqouis head of a pin, they prick the >independent but unsatisied>thick spongy tongue of a cacalogical idiot slackly vomiting>that splendid burden of time.

"in between the
punctuating
agonies
life is such a
gentle habit"

the stereo is from the middle of the last century, which as a named thing is an effing terrible thing, and the stereo is disguised as a cabinet, with a hand-painted Chinese motif. It picks up all the doom trumpets in the air, and exudes them in its muffled tin voice.
A little while ago it got to fever pitch, and has stayed there though it seems like they can't keep it up forever, the trumpets. To look outside you would never know it was ending. It's sunny, the trucks rumble and squeak by, startling the cat. The workers get off work and shout across the street to one another as they get in their cars. Laden shopping carts rattle past on their way to the recycling plant, pushed by sad stories. The light fades. At night, souped up Acuras, Toyotas and Hondas peel and scream around the turn, and the house defies the carbonated wind.

"I laughed, I cried, I took my Ritalin"

last night I watched a PBS program on the French Revolution, told through the lives of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, by historians who somehow, despite the messages they were delivering, seemed to act as if they were close personal friends of the King and Queen. Which is awkward. A main point I took away was that, when one looks at upheavals in the past, there is a retrospective mythologizing of the 'idea whose time has come'. The king and queen couldn't conquer and rule it, and despite their best interests were worn down and forced to acquiesce in order to keep their lives and livelihoods (for the nonce).
At this moment Congress is to decide whether certain CEO bonuses should be subjected to taxation. A man has issued a video calling for the heads (and addresses) of particular CEO's. Is this the new manifestation of class warfare in our egalitarian, meritorial, class-free midst? Is Main Street fermenting the gall and rage to storm Wall Street? It seems for sure that there is novel use of divisive class-based rhetoric and widespread 'outrage' (catharsis). Not that I think any of it is mistaken. Just unexpected after what seems like a lull.
Maybe it is just the vengeful set's substitution of the financial sector as foil into the space voided of Bush.
An epithet for the times: A rising tide obscured all rocks.
And by 'class' I don't mean (upper, upper middle...) or (Proletarians, Bourgois...) but I do very much mean a struggle arising from deep seated inequity in the control of the means (of production, reproduction, sustenance...). And today there were a reported 3m strikers in the streets of France.


Digging the Masabumi Kikuchi over at Orgy in Rythm, with Al Foster, Gary Peacock, tablas and percussion. Deep digging groove and melodic soulful and Japanese.

d. cherry & co, etc.

here's a nice, out recording by one of my favorite musicians, recorded 1982 for ECM and including
Colin Walcott on sitar, dulcimer, tablas;
D.C. on the trumpet and something called a doussn'gouni:
"an instrument from Mali that I believe I've seen referred to as a 'hunter's guitar'".
Nana Vasconcelos on berimbau, percussion
oh and all three partake in chanting and humming and trilling and whining. I bought it on reissued cd about 5 years ago because I was getting into D.C. and I liked the cover.

I listened to a Quincy Jones interview on public radio the other night while I was temping as a night watchman. Some memorable points were that he said Herbie Hancock is the best musician he's ever met, that students should learn by intensive mimicry, Tupac wrote whimsical poetry about nature and classical literature, only 5% of Americans use their passport, of the 11% percent that have them, the global economic crisis proves that we are one world, and Q would be honored to be your Secretary of the Arts. I'm all for it.

Codona 3

And here is a re-up, a better file of BPM, a killing fast and precise and scandinavian jazz trio outing with Zappa-tones provided by T. Bozzio's wild compositions.
Info/Try

pithless

the night has released its spores; the slow decay bubbles and murmurs below the stretching surface of artificial light. Most are fast within their chambers, lapped at by the ethereal waters of their dreams. But for those still sucking public air, there would be no need of the blanket of still. The trees silent in their boles. The buildings cease to clamor across the surface of the land, and the voices of humans and machines doppler and reverberate, or do they?
The sound of footsteps at night could be the same as those in the day, after all. But sounds (and other peoples' things) can not hang as long in the day's thin air. They follow a straight line to an early undoing. The lost and the tribes of the lost and their attendants do best not to prick the ears of the stalking phantoms with their silences. And what the day has taken from them dangles ahead before the morning's gate, separated by an infinity of unknowing and surrender from where we were just now. Cassanita: Rob stopped by, he's sorry he missed you. There is a heavy kitchen knife hidden behind a pipe in the stairwell. Strawberry Jones is not allowed on the premises (5.6 Black Female). And Rosy: that guy was here, came to keep you company he says. He likes to keep you company, he says, and from that I know that you are either capable of stone cold indifference or you are a creature of exuperate compassion, sympathy or whatever it is that these words are bound by connotations never to express. Anyways, he's pushed back the release of his rap album to 2017 because 'first impressions are long impressions' and you can't go in to an A&R office with shit. Gotta buy house for his momma-who yes ok is involved with the Gambini crime family and boy is that a rich story mine but it was she that passed on to him his proliferate sweetness, because it sure wasn't...

Brad Mehldau

In honor of the sweet SFJazz line up that came out recently, check out this Brad Mehldau live album (actually only the first of a 2 CD release) featuring awesome versions of 'Wonderwall' and 'Black Hole Sun'. This shit is tight.
Brad Mehldau, p
Larry Grenadier, b
Jeff Ballard, d
More info is here.

Also, please check this out, McCoy Tyner's "Enlightenment Suite".
McCoy, p
Azar Lawrence, ts & ss
Joony Boothe, b
Alphonse Mouzon, d
Live from the Montreaux Jazz Festival, 1973


If you like 'em, tell me about it in the comments. And if anyone would like the second Mehldau CD let me know. Cheers.

Music that filters through the world to my heart like t

To start with, thanks to Smooth @ My Jazz World , Ish at Ile Oxumare , El Goog Ja, Nine Sisters, Oufar Kahn, Orgy in Rhythm and all the other prodigiously active jazz music bloggers who in the last year have worked a crack into the surface of the 70's that I have had the good fortune to slip through, to experience the underneath.
Recently I watched "Amandla": A documentary about the role and development of music through the experiences of the Apartheid in South Africa. Mostly it was interviews with singers and musicians, producers, politicians, poets...etc. , who artistically resisted and reacted during that time, as well some were publicly outspoken and participants in protests and gatherings....but to me the most deeply felt part was the way in which certain songs that were huge hits on the radio (which was owned and broadcast by whites) had these secret, non-english clues and codes and messages in them, and became these anthems a la 'we will overcome'. But in addition to the historical power and significance, I've found out that some of this music is really burning.
The most recognized figurehead of this movement is trumpeter/singer/composer Hugh Masekela. I first had the album "I am not afraid" pictured below:
At first I was let down after the first track which is such a SUCH A killing! version of Dizzy's "Night in Tunisia". Its like he kidnaps the song and makes it a night in the crazed, confused, pissed, passionate government relocation camps of Johannesburg. It kills. The rest of the stuff grew on me too, even the relatively cheesy stuff (tracks 2 & 3). Soul music for sure, the trumpet is sexy, feel good music. You can find it here. I also grabbed "Hugh Masekela is Alive and Well at the Whiskey" which is more soul jazz and seems very natural bridging the Sam Cooke and the Duke, live in Hollywood 1967. Get it here.

Another South African artist from this era to break into the AmerOpean music world was Letta Mbulu. Here is here 1970 Chisa release "Letta". Great soul voice, some great songs and some smooth proto disco. All of it good. Get that bad boy here.

Next up. Recently I've listened to all the Wayne Shorter albums from '64's "Hear no Evil" to '69's "Super Nova". Now, I am an unabashed Weather Report fan, but 'Super Nova', given that it features several future members of that band, along with a pre-return-to-forever Chic, sounds nothing like the proto-Report I expected. And it kills. Find it here.
Anyways I think it goes like this, if I had to rate them:

Super Nova
Adam's Apple
Juju
The Soothesayer
The All-seeing Eye
Hear No Evil
Night Dreamer
Schizophrenia

but shit looking back up there, they are all great and Wayne remains the Mayne in my opinion. They are all available readily online so I won't waste the time to up them or find the links. And then I recently learned that he had this free jazz trumpeter brother Alan. So I get Alan's "Orgasm" with C. Haden, Gato Barbieri and Rashid Ali from 1968. It is really smokin' free jazz like somebody made Don Cherry really mad and he now and then is coming right out at you in predatory bursts, without losing that sense of completely open, sinuous composition that great free jazz hazz.

And here is Steve Grossman, Gene Perla, Don Alias and Jan Hammer doing some pre-Stone Alliance funking. I'd call it hard fusion or just fucking ass kicking music. Even if Steve's aura is the wrong color, he is a great player.

Courting Eudemonia

I've been re-watching the Planet Earth BBC series here and there. Once I watched it with commercials embedded which was about the most excruciating TV experience I can imagine.

But anyways, the wilde beasts of Earth!

The colors, the spirits, the Sun and the unfathomable cycling.

The balance of beauty and utter, unseeing ruthlessness in the face of beauty in the face of utter, unseeing ruthlessness.

I am strongly persuaded towards the biological imperative of vegetarianism. Get me the hell out of that direct predator/prey wheel, consuming our closest most vulnerably delicious neighbors...the existence of the one ever enslaved to the existence of the other, the drive to kill, the ethics of reproduction-what's best is what feeds the children. I do not envy the hunter its need.
But then that there are these other creatures that seem to live above this brutal chain in a different interval as to the energy transformation need. By the simple act of eating grass, or fruit, or vegetables to sustain themselves, these fierce baboons escape the famine and murderous obsession while being big and bad-ass enough to dissuade their would be hunters.
Not to mention Panda Bears! What the hell is a Panda Bear if not a god-spirit, a buddha-come and blessed into newcarnation.
And oh man there are these snow monkeys with light blue eye regions and feathery fluff that seem like they would float in the purest air.
So my new biodirective: be the Babookeyda

crispy web roll, or, this morning I saw it in tubes

Interspersed amid simple chores, food rites, and blank spaces several things have bubbled up for my reflections. And as it is said: if it bubbles it is, most likely, worth the trouble.

First off, not only do 'M16 officers' (These are MP's or Marines or what?) get immunity from the government in regard to crimes against humanity that they may have (why bother investigating further?) perpetrated on behest of the United States of America in the interrogation of Gitmo detainees. The best part is that the diplomatic power relationship that protects them from consequence is exactly the threat of American abandoning Britain's side in "Intellegence Cooperation." The prisoner in question, whose case found its way to a British court, and who is said to have had his scrotum sliced by a razorblade, among other outrages, has been determined innocent. So what do we learn from this gnarly little knot of W. reverb?
As we once morbidly suspected but gradually knew:
('National Security' + 'Strong Diplomatic Ties') > most other human concerns (uncleft scrotums)

to me it seems that there is some more complicated, damning math to be had here. trying to parse it out.

That England is protecting American volunteer soldiers who colluded with other, British volunteer soldiers to disfigure the undercarraige of an Islamic British citizen who was involuntarily, unjustly incarcerated and stripped of all attestable rights including the right to a sealed scrotum on an American military base in Communist Cuba, and that the wiggy, flop-sweaty magistrates of Britian have found legally that they have no public comment to make or no duty to admit these facts into the public record because, assumedly, to do so may lead to a contraction of cooperative goodwill between the bosses of volunteer soldiers from friendly countries who want to be able to oversee the fraternal slicing of testicle bags without rebuke, and America has threatened that they will maybe not let the British officers partake of these youthful frivolities, if Britain tells on them. Moreover, the better to stay mum since such troublesome-type news reports may have the undesired consequence of embarassing Britons.

Somewhere in that paragraphical examination there is an obscene kernal.

Next: Big Breaking Robot News!!!!
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126946.600-unnatural-selection-robots-start-to-evolve.html?full=true

Scientists at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK are fine tuning a robotic operating system which not only mimics the mechanism of evolution across robot 'generations', but can actively 'evolve' itself in real time. Perhaps fears should be allayed by the truism: the evolution of technology represents an exponential upward trajectory in time and that it outpaces genetic evolution by probably millions of times. This seems obvious enough. So why my concern/excitement?

The proliferation of artificial intellegences embodied in finely articulated mechanical systems continues to be an unfulfilled promise in this present incarnation of the future, despite great leaps in technology. To a world in which robots are a marginal, if fascinating, presence, mostly consigned to science fiction, industrial plants and vacuuming pools and carpets, news of this order is allowed to pass freely under the bridge.

Yet these advances and these creations may well shape the future yet.

The new system at Aberdeen improves on earlier evolutionary algorithms in that the robot is able to respond to its own feedback by making adjustments and trying new possibilities when it is unable to meet the demands of the task it has been programmed for. ( The fact that there are a species of extant humanoid robots that are able to evolve solutions to such programmed problems is apparently old news.) The new Incremental Evolutionary Algorithm allows the robot to reconfigure its own 'brain' given changing circumstances.

This heralds the existance of complex, multifaceted, learning, immortal, intellegent and constantly evolving humanoids of great strength or other mechanical ability. But it also cracks the door open for robots to perform any number of learned human-order tasks. And there is no data to suggest that robots will develop political class consciousness or expect maternity leave, medical benefits or company happy hours. They will, however, systematically exhaust all given possibilities for the accomplishment of a programmed goal, probably in a fraction of the time that a mere human would require.

The job market is going to get even tougher.

Of course, as Obama suggested recently, one great use for such robots would be to replace them on manned space missions, to represent the humanoid form to any celestial onlookers. (Obama didn't actually mention humanoid robots, but he did call for an end to manned missions and replacement with robotic systems (more economical, safer, and sterile).

Oversight, regulation and a strict adherence to the Three Laws is archly important.

Robotic cars, though, I am in support of. A recent NPR program had a scientist saying "there is absolutely no reason that people should be responsible for driving cars, which causes so much senseless carnage and strife." or something just like that. true that.

So that's all for now.

Immortal jellyfish! We are so screwed.

Musically, I've been listening to a lot of jazz. Still. Why?
Is it a dead sound? Am I usurping something that has no organic connection to my life experience, aping the breakthroughs of the past out of Ludditic neglect for the dynamism of the present?
Is my connoisseurship an empty posturing? A snobbering?
I try to keep my ego out of it. Who does? Keeps what out of where?

One reason, for sure, is the proliferate nature of the jazz subsphere of the blogosphere....the mines are bearing. Also the way that jazz is sort of and seems always to have been half-obscured to the popular eye, hidden in plain sight. But am I a guardian or a usurper? Or does it matter?

Anyway. I'm starting 'Molloy' by S.B. and it is completely unlike anything I have ever read, and much simpler than I'd imagined-so far, so far that is.

I made my debut playing drums in front of strangers the other day at a bar, sitting in for a song in my friend's honky-tonk/klezmer/country rock band. My non-adherence to the drummer's directive "keep the beat" did not go over so well, but I think there were fun moments, as far as my sensativity to others' perceptions were not obliterated by self-conscioussness. Anyways, nobody got angry and punched me in the face or anything.

Went camping in Big Basin this past weekend and partied in the woods.

Musics coming.

good evening

Plain as the driven mob and purely displeased, I stood for a while at the back of the line. Light chatter, chalant nonchalance. People passed on the sidewalk, many curious, and everyone watched them going. I think there were several sweaters, sweatshirts, skirts and khaki pants. Maybe a tie or a coat, I can’t tell. Well, we stood there waiting for a good ten minutes, before anything happened. And since I was still the last in the line at the end of that time, I can’t be sure how long anyone else was standing there. Maybe I would have asked if I’d been forced by nonevents to stand there longer. Instead a beard walked out wearing a store brand t shirt matching the decal on the store window. He’d like to take our resumes and apologizes because they can’t see everyone today and he’d hate for us to stand around like this to no avail (I pretended to assume he was talking about everyone but me).
I didn’t give him much of a mug, but I got out of it quickly, and checked a box. Then I drove to the next place, who told me the cross streets of the next place, where I went after that. In between I ate a wrap in the car. I haven’t eaten any meat in about a week. I have smoked some cigarettes. A lot of that (the meat) is due to an inspired series of faux-meatball meatball sandwiches. Today I learned how to play some guitar chords, applied remotely for a small batch of jobs, enjoyed a live jazz piano improvisation, ate with friends, arrived too late for happy hour sushi but in time for $2 beer, offered to drive a friend who’s contacts are starting to act up after all these years, forgot I was wearing glasses when I wasn’t, mutually consoled loved ones about their stance in life, did two pull ups, and listened to the final track on Light as a Feather 2 and a half times. I drove across the city in the full, unimpeded afternoon sun. I told myself and one other person that I wanted to write a blog at least twice a week, or write on a blog or in one or just blog. I encouraged one other person to blog, after reading another person’s blog. I paraphrased Marxist concepts as I understood them, and made an oblique accreditation. I wondered what other people are really like, then I wondered what I am really like. I drove around with the sunroof of my girlfriend’s Mercedes open with my broken bike wheel in the back seat which now is several hundred yards away due to street cleaning (ostensibly: it hasn’t been cleaned) .