Month: August 2007

RIP, Max Roach

I saw Max and his band play in the early 1990s at UVA, when the university was still putting on tremendous jazz festivals that brought everybody who was anybody in the jazz world in. The jazz fan that I am today would love to be able to remember who was in Max’s band that night. All I remember is that his dry beat and drier wit stole the show that night. And I am sorry that I only got a chance to see him that once; though I am glad that I got the chance.

Obituaries: BBC, NYT, WaPo.

Recommended recordings: just about any Parker or Diz recording; the We Insist! Freedom Now jazz suite, featuring Abbey Lincoln on some seriously inspired vocals; Money Jungle, the trio recording that he cut with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. Other pivotal recordings listed by Ben Ratliff in the Times.

John Lennon on iTunes

The presence of the third Beatle’s solo catalog on iTunes (the holdout at this point is the sublime George Harrison, whose estate one must imagine is going to take some time to process the question of moving to new formats) is old news at this point. In fact, John’s solo catalog generally is old news for most listeners—or is it? I would guess that the number of music aficionados born after 1970 who have listened to much more than Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, and maybe Shaved Fish is pretty low.

I got Mind Games earlier this week and am listening to it right now. There is a lot of mid-70s paunch in this recording; the session musicians aren’t bringing their a-game, and John’s songwriting isn’t at his finest here. Except, of course, for the title track. And “Aisumasen,” which is pretty touching.

And one verse in “Out of the Blue” which completely grabbed me by the throat:

All my life has been a long slow knife
I was born just to get to you

That’s quite a statement. In another universe, that would be the standard toast from a bride to a groom. Coming as it did on the heels of John’s “lost weekend,” it’s got even more power and resonance.

It’s nice to have the opportunity to go back and sample some of this material without having to devote physical space to the disc.

Busy

Let me count the ways:

  1. Trying to track down the authors of a Microsoft code sample which essentially disappeared when Microsoft pulled down the GotDotNet community site.
  2. Being gobsmacked by this article about “Conception Day” in Russia—a state holiday set aside to reverse the population decline, for exactly the purpose that you might imagine. Gotta be a hoax…
  3. Watching the WSJ try to find new angles to cover in Wikipedia. The real fun is in the discussions, huh? Wait until they start covering watched articles and user pages…
  4. Trying hard not to laugh at the description of Giuliani journalistic chronicler Wayne Barrett as “a sort of dark Boswell to Rudy’s
    Johnson”     …in a note about Giuliani’s philandering.

Ding, dong…

…the Turd Blossom is out. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out, pal.

But I can’t help but watch to see where he shows up next. Rove has always seemed to me to be the Zelig of the cynical right… which means that he might serve a cipher of a candidate like Fred Thompson, or even Mitt “dog lover” Romney, well.

Of course, the last time I cheered the departure of a hated administration official, the replacement wasn’t a heck of a lot better, so I need to be careful. But the gray skies seem a little brighter today.

An unwelcome victory

Notes about undemocratic, non-representative findings aside, the victory of Mitt Romney in this weekend’s Iowa straw poll is heartening and troubling. Heartening, because it positions as the Republicans’ leading hope a man with no discernible positions, whose chief political experience is four years spent running away from Massachusetts while running for President. As Talking Points Memo points out, it speaks to a lack of enthusiasm for the field. Half the leading Democratic contenders should be able to make mincemeat of this guy.

The disheartening part is that so many damned people in the straw poll voted for this inflated ball of suit and hair. Hasn’t anyone learned anything from watching his performance in Massachusetts? If there is one lesson to be taken away from the last seven years, it is that electing a weak façade of a politician for president means handing over control to the back-room apparatchiks that have been setting up secret prisons, wiretapping America’s citizens, waging war on moisture, and dismantling checks and balances systematically since Cheney and Bush took office. And nothing about Romney’s track record in Massachusetts suggests that he is prepared to say no to the cabal.

I would really like to see both parties giving us a vision for how the country is going to move away from the Bush/Cheney administration’s lunacies. I don’t think that’s going to happen in 2008.

Further proof that no training in life goes wasted

For this weekend’s Tanglewood residency, I am staying at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge. It’s a ramshackle monster of a place, in continuous operation since the late 18th century (with sloping floors et al to prove it); has a prominent place in an iconic Norman Rockwell painting (“Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas”); and bills itself as a luxury destination. Which is why I always wondered how the BSO and the TFC could afford to billet volunteer singers there, as they do for nearly every residency.

The answer, it seems, is simple. There is this class of room at the Red Lion called B&B rooms. Neither of the Bs stands for en suite bathroom.

So—just like on the Lawn—I am throwing on a robe in the morning to go get a shower, etc. Unlike on the lawn, there is only a single shared shower and toilet per floor, for about 12 B&B rooms per floor.

I shouldn’t really gripe. The other amenities are nice; the service is great; the live jazz quartet I heard in the Lion’s Den on Thursday and Friday nights was exceptional. But I thought I left wearing a bathrobe in public behind me 13 years ago. Ah well. Apparently, plus ça change…

Beer drinker’s blog

No, I’m not planning another project. I’m referring to Pete Brown’s Blog, one of the funnier and more observant blogs I’ve read about beer, pub culture, and other related matters. Pete is the author of several books on beer, none of which I’ve read; sounds like a trip to the library is in order.

I’m particularly taken with this little piece of whimsey: he plans to take a pin (4.5 gallons) of IPA from the brewery in Burton-on-Trent to Calcutta … via boat. The purpose is to find out whether the sea journey really does “condition” the India Pale Ale style as we were always told. Should be an interesting story to follow.

Wet

The only thing worse than having to work through a day off, is doing it on a rainy day.

Of course, there are those who will tell you that this is the best way to work on your day off, since you wouldn’t be having any fun anyway. To those misguided souls, I say: nah. The rain adds insult to injury. You get wet walking from place to place and you know that at the end of your journey you still have to pull out the laptop.

Context: I’m in Tanglewood this weekend. I had rehearsals yesterday and it was gorgeous, but I was also a little under the weather and couldn’t appreciate the great outdoors. Today I’m better but stuck working.

At least there won’t be a problem getting into the shed for tonight’s concert—if Ives and Carter haven’t already scared away all the attendees, the rain will do the rest.

Question: Who made AT&T the Internet speech cop?

Bad timing as AT&T tries to convince Congress that net neutrality legislation isn’t necessary: it blocks some lyrics critical of the President during a Pearl Jam webcast from Lollapalooza on Saturday. When pressed to explain, it aid it was the fault of an overzealous “content monitor.”

A what? Folks, I believe that’s called a censor. Call a spade a spade.

As the band says, and the commentator echoes, this is about something much bigger than censoring a band.

There are worse fates

Early start to the morning today, with a presentation that ran from 8 to noon Pacific time (I have been in Seattle for a business trip since yesterday afternoon). And then? Driving back into Seattle with KEXP on the car radio. A relatively leisurely afternoon spent checking email, working on proposals, catching up on status with the home office. And, um, lunch (rock shrimp tacos!) with a beer or two at the Hilltop Ale House.

Now at SeaTac (viva!) after making my way through an absurdly long security line, waiting for my red-eye flight back. And sitting at (drumroll) an Anthony’s, just the other side of aforementioned absurdly long security line, with a Deschutes Black Butte Porter and a plate of oysters on the way.

As a very wise man once said, who can say I am not/the happy genius of my household?

Famous forbearers

I continue my work on researching the early history of the Virginia Glee Club. Google Books has proved invaluable, both in sourcing the birth year of the group and in providing a reference to a famous alumnus about whose membership I was ignorant: Woodrow Wilson, who sang tenor in the Glee Club during his one year of law school at UVA.

My awe at having found myself among the ranks of presidents is diminished only slightly by my learned contempt of Wilson for his re-institutionalization of segregation in DC when he was president.

This update has been published to Wikipedia, where I am editing the history of the Club.

A teaser: Glee Club past history

bill clinton shaking hands with the Virginia Glee Club on the 250th birthday of Thomas Jefferson

I’ve been digging into my archives this weekend, prompted by a contact from an old Glee Club friend. I have quite a few things to scan and post, but that will wait for another time, when I’m not getting ready to fly across country early the next morning.

In the meantime, I’ll post a teaser—a scaled-down section of a scanned photo that is exactly what it looks like: 55 guys from UVA shaking hands with Bill Clinton in 1993. More memorabilia from that day, including a higher res (halftone) of the photo, when I get back.

Friday Random 10: Getting back to it edition

Because I am woefully behind in my posting, and because it is Friday, and because I am listening to music:

  1. Jeff Buckley, “Calling You” (Live at Sin-é)
  2. Low, “Silver Rider” (The Great Destroyer)
  3. David Byrne, “Don’t Fence Me In” (Red Hot + Blue)
  4. U2, “Party Girl” (Under a Blood Red Sky)
  5. Sonny Rollins, “Blue 7” (Saxophone Colossus)
  6. Roy Orbison, “It’s Too Late” (Sun Recordings)
  7. Peaches ‘n‘ Cream, “112”
  8. Nirvana, “Serve the Servants” (In Utero)
  9. The Tallis Scholars, “Requiem 5. Sanctus – Benedictus” (Cardoso: Requiem)
  10. Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, “I Still Have That Other Girl” (Painted from Memory)

End in sight to reboot hell?

I have been struggling with Windows Vista for a month or two. Regularly the system ran out of resources, regularly reboots were required to re-enable functionality. The symptoms were eerily reminiscent of classic GDI resource heap exhaustion: windows would refuse to open, pop-up menus stubbornly stayed closed, applications reported an inability to save to disk or access the registry.

I am now trying various patches to see if I can fix the problem. After a blue screen of death (yes, those still happen on Vista), it occurred to me that the problem must be in a device driver; after all, that code gets to play at a privileged OS level where it can do things like attempt to overwrite read-only memory. I suspected the video driver, and attempted to use an update from Intel’s web site to update the driver (for the record, it’s the Intel Mobile Chipset 945), but was told that the upgrade was not installable on my machine (an HP Compaq NC6320 laptop).

Now I am getting a message from the Windows problem reporting system that one of my issues may be fixed by a hotfix for KB 931671. We’ll see if this does fix the problem, or if I continue down the path of no return with this OS. Already not a good sign: I am being forwarded for the second time in a 20 minute call to another department because the reps I have been speaking to are not authorized to distribute the hotfix.

Manila minus one

A blogging great, Doc Searls, is off the Manila platform, on which this blog is based, and onto WordPress. I have been wanting to make a similar move for a long time, ever since I used WordPress for the Sony Boycott Blog.

One of my readers last year offered to migrate my Manila content to a WordPress blog, and I am definitely thinking that it’s time to take advantage of the offer. If only there were enough hours in the day.