Blippin' Jazz

20090823

Listening to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. Miles was working on it exactly 40 years ago. Some may disagree, but it’s my favorite Miles album, and that certainly is saying something.



Great Mati Klarwein jacket, too. I put it up on my new jazztrain profile on blip.fm



http://blip.fm/~c7fgk

But here ya go, should you be interested:



A funky, spacey sound.

I think this jazz profile pretty much completes things for me on blip.fm. Maybe someday I might get back in a country / folk sort of mood, but it’s been many years now since I really have been into that. Every now and then I’ll listen to a song or even a CD, but I can’t say I’ve gotten into a particular phase in a long time.

While you can search within blip.fm for music--and sometimes it’s necessary, because YouTube doesn’t have everything--yet--YouTube really is, as you probably already know, just an amazing treasury of clips. Mostly I’ve been exploring classical, rock/pop, blues, and now jazz, in that order.

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but one of the nice features of blip.fm is you can link each profile to a Twitter account, which I have, and that enables you to meet some interesting folks. For instance, my first follower on my jazztrain Twitter was TheDaveHolland.



http://blip.fm/~c74to

It seems that sometimes that’s updated by his people and sometimes by him.

I was followed by Paul Winter after I mentioned on my classical Twitter

http://twitter.com/musicaclassica

(linked to my blip.fm that I wasn’t in the mood for classical, but was instead listening to world music, like Kitaro and Paul Winter. This piece, Anabela, is beautiful with Brazilian guitarist/vocallist Renato Braz
and Winter sweetly playing sax. I used to apply the now rather musty label, “New Age,” to him, but “World Music” fits well now, because Winter has often incorporated Third World and Native American music, not to mention many nature sounds at times.

24 Hours of Air Traffic (Animated Map)

Fascinating 24-hour view of global air traffic. At first glimpse, I thought, wow, Europe is the center of the traffic. But I quickly realized that, of course, the concentration of flights follows the sunlight. People would rather avoid landing somewhere at 3 a.m., if they can help it.

Alan Moore on faces of different eras

In the first text part of Watchmen, "Under the Hood," Alan Moore writes:

"Moe Vernon was a man around fifty-five or so, and he had one of those old New York faces you don’t see anymore.



"It’s funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they’re related.



"Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see there’s a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again."



It's something that probably we all think at some point. I'm not sure. Is it the hair? The clothes? Or even the cameras, etc? Actually, one of the guys in the first photo (from the 1950s) looks something like one of the guys in the second photo, which is from the 1980s.


1950s photo licensed through Creative Commons from freeparking’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/freeparking/468956377/

1980s photo licensed through Creative Commons from
foundphotoslj’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/foundphotoslj/334767030/

athletic photo licensed through Creative Commons from lululemon athletica's photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lululemonathletica/3491309891/

Keith Olbermann attacks Congressmen owned by the healthcare industry

I didn't know anyone actually said things like this on TV. An extraordinary attack on GOP and Dem Congressmen who have been bought and sold by the healthcare industry. Please watch this video venom from MSNBC's Keith Olbermann

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/32277034#32277034

John Sinclair

Back in 1972, John Lennon & Yoko came out with a politically radical album, Sometime in New York City, that Rolling Stone called “artistic suicide.”

I was pretty much at my radical peak at that time, so I had no problem with it at all. Just about all the songs espoused radical causes, from Angela Davis to Belfast, feminism to legalizing drugs. On that subject, there was “John Sinclair”:



Manager of Detroit’s punkish MC5 band, Sinclair was also heavily involved with the White Panthers, a radical group that backed the Black Panthers. Wikipedia does a good job of filling in the rest:

After a series of convictions for possession of marijuana, Sinclair was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1969 after giving two joints of marijuana to an undercover narcotics officer.[2] This sentence sparked the landmark "Free John Now Rally" at Ann Arbor's Crisler Arena in December 1971. The event brought together a who's-who of left-wing luminaries, including pop musicians John Lennon (who recorded the song, "John Sinclair" on his Some Time in New York City album), Yoko Ono, David Peel, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs and Bob Seger, jazz artists Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd, and speakers Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale.[3] Three days after the rally, Sinclair was released from prison when the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state's marijuana statutes were unconstitutional. These events inspired the creation of Ann Arbor’s annual pro-legalization Hash Bash rally, which continues to be held as of 2009, and contributed to the drive for decriminalization of marijuana under the Ann Arbor city charter (see Marijuana laws in Ann Arbor, Michigan).

Well, here’s Sinclair, doing some poetry with jazz accompaniment:



Oh, and, as you can see, MC5 was a pretty exciting act:

A few words about the movie, 12 Monkeys (1996)

Generally a pretty good movie! My main problems with it were:

a) Willis’ character was a major nutcase, violent, and not too bright, either. He’s supposed to travel back in time, not to prevent a biomedical event that kills most of humanity, but to seek information about the virus that would help those in the future deal with it better. Why on earth would you send him, of all people, back to the past on such an important mission?

b) A few of Terry Gilliam’s art direction choices, especially the lab in the future, were absurd and detracted from the believability. He did the same thing, in spades, in Brazil. That can work in the sort of flicks Tim Burton usually does, but it’s just a silly diversion with something like this.



But I’ve always liked Willis, and Madeleine Stowe was very good.... Brad PItt is a bit over the top here. The fact that he was nominated for Best Supporting for this says a whole lot about how stupid and unfair the Oscars are....

This was “inspired by” the famous French short, La Jetée, which we watched in junior year honors English. (Our teacher was media-oriented, and we watched quite a few important (and cool) shorts in class.) Anyway, “inspired by” is a good way of putting it. The movie uses the basic paradoxical time -traveling ideas of the La Jetée storyline, but of course, adds a whole lot to it in the way of plot and characters.

I had actually written a little short story for 8th grade English class that was pretty similar (though a whole lot shorter). In that, the character travels back in time to prevent a nuclear war and ends up being the one who starts it.

No doubt, somehow my subconscious traveled two years into the future to draw inspiration from my viewing of La Jetée....

Moby, Coldplay, Walter Cronkite

20090719 Blog

I’m wrapping up day one of a three day weekend. Spent rather a lot of time online today, in a fairly idle way. Listened to Moby’s new album, “Wait for Me.” If you’re on Facebook, you can listen to it at http://apps.facebook.com/mobydownloads/. I thought it was kinda blah, actually. I liked Moby’s “18.” This is way inferior to that.

And then I downloaded, free, Coldplay’s live album. Only listened to the first song of that, so far, which was OK. That one you can get at http://bit.ly/WTgiP. It’s a zip file, but it’s OK. It’s definitely from Coldplay.

I also listened to all of a CD that had two old 1965 Peter & Gordon albums, “I Go to Pieces” and “True Love Ways.” Here’s the thing: when P&G are good, they are very good. When they are bad, they are just awful. Their cover of Elvis’ “All Shook Up” is about the lamest recording I’ve ever heard. But that “I Go to Pieces” is sweet! They were one uneven act. And fairly often, Gordon’s singing was just absurd.

This has been kind of a 60s day. The whole of CBS Sunday Morning was dedicated to Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS newsman who just died. I wonder if my Brit friends have heard of him? While he was a consistently important and reliable newsman, he is generally famous for three broadcasts, and the reason he is famous for them is precisely because he deviated from his usual, meticulous, factual reporting. People trusted him because of that reporting, but also because they could see he was a real person, with real emotions that came out during the momentous events he reported.

The first, of course, was his reporting of the assassination of JFK. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen all of this. The guy taking the presidential seal off the podium where JFK was supposed to speak... Never saw that before. I was in the 4th grade, and I think I was home for lunch (I lived a few blocks from school and could walk home). I was (seriously) probably watching Bozo the Clown on Chicago’s WGN at the time. They probably interrupted it with a bulletin, which is probably why TV bulletins even now send a chill down my spine. But I really don’t remember anything until the part where I got back to school and the teachers were all crying and they had us watch TV all afternoon.


Couldn’t find a decent clip of his Vietnam speech, but what happened was, he’d been over there and was very troubled by the loss of American lives. It was after the Tet offensive, and he believed he had to editorialize against the war, because the government and the military were simply lying. After his speech, President Johnson famously said, “If we’ve lost Walter Cronkite, we’ve lost America.”

Finally, this is a short clip about his reporting of the lunar landing (which BTW happened 40 years ago today). In it, you can see his famous reaction, taking off his glasses and saying, “Oh, boy!” Overwhelmed: