Secret Society

Let 'em know you're there

The Self-Styled Siren on the late Paul Newman and his "effortless" charm:

But the Siren is here to talk about Newman's acting, and to remind us that charm does not follow naturally from being handsome, nor does possessing that quality in life mean you can bring it to the screen. […] Newman seems to have been a wonderful man in real life, but that's irrelevant to his talent. The things he was able to bring to the screen came from his dedication to acting, not the Good Fairy Merryweather hovering over his cradle.

For further evidence, you don't have to sit in a dark room with Newman's entire filmography on disc. All you have to do is watch The Silver Chalice, his first movie, from 1954. It is neither, as Newman variously described it, the worst movie ever made, nor the worst movie made in the 1950s. It is bad, however. And Newman, as he would tell every interviewer for the rest of his life, is terrible. […] [W]hat leaps out at you is this: Newman isn't charming. […] He is anticharm, in the sense of antimatter. When Pier Angeli looks at him, it isn't with love, but with wonderment that this gorgeous man has the personality of a just-caught red snapper, with lifeless eyes (can you believe it?) and ungraceful movements.

Well, that was his first role. He was never that bad again. Two years later he took the part intended for James Dean in Somebody Up There Likes Me. Boxer Rocky Graziano was a well-loved figure, but many's the character beloved in real life who comes across far differently in a biopic. This is, after all, the story of a guy who starts out more familiar with jails and reformatories than schools, a member of the Greatest Generation who declines to contribute to the struggle, instead repeatedly going AWOL from the Army and eventually earning a dishonorable discharge for striking an officer. That this selfish, immature delinquent becomes quite lovable is due in part to a screenplay that takes care to show the roots of Graziano's behavior, but even more credit is due to Paul Newman. Some will take this as heresy, but the Siren doubts very much that the intense, fiery Dean would have been as sweetly tentative in the love scenes (again with Pier Angeli, looking as though she can't believe her costar's improvement) or as sympathetically big-lunkish when behaving badly.

What was he doing for the two years between roles? Some television, some theater, classes at the Actor's Studio. What flicked the switch? Hard work, definitely. Accretion of experience, I suppose, and perhaps the knowledge that the movie was a do-or-die second chance. Not to mention the fact that Graziano, a street tough who was about as close to the real-life Newman as Rosalynn Carter is to Sandra Bernard, was nevertheless a part far more suited to the actor's ineffably modern sensibility than some silly Greek slave. Somebody Up There Likes Me was the first inkling of Newman's unique talent for playing antiheros, an ability to burrow down into the lives of the small-time and hard-luck cases and find what could bring the audience to the character's side.

Read the whole thing.

Keep on burnin'

The Bad Plus and David Rhyshpan say goodbye to New Orleans's own Earl Palmer. Palmer was the sound of early rock 'n roll -- maybe you don't recognize his name but you definitely recognize his beats. This video (linked to by both TBP and DR) is outstanding:

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New Orleans has such a complex and specific musical history that it can be daunting for outsiders to try to approach it, or even evoke it obliquely. Especially if you happen to be a "classical" musician by training. And most definitely if you are trying to craft a musical response to the unimaginable and ongoing tragedy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. That's what makes Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads so remarkable -- it's the kind of ostentatiously ambitious work that by rights, should never work... and yet it does. I have a lot more to say about this piece and no time to say it (which is basically the story of this blog), but please check out Isaac Butler's review over at Buzzine. Ted Hearne is at the Stone Sunday night, performing some new music with a group that includes many players from the Katrina Ballads band.

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Also new on New Amsterdam Records, Secret Society's own Sam Sadigurksy presents the second installment of The Words Project. Sam has crafted intricate musical settings of texts by literary heavyweights Andrew Boyd, Czeslaw Milosz, Langston Hughes, Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, David Ignatow, Audre Lorde, and Caitlin Upton. You can stream the whole record here -- check it out.

Ingrid Jensen, Eric Vloeimans, Tim Hagans - FONT @ Jazz Standard, 25 Sept 2008

Ingrid Jensen, Eric Vloeimans, Tim Hagans

More pics below the fold...

Ceremonial

Heartfelt congratulations to saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón on having been named a 2008 MacArthur Fellow. I am a big fan of Miguel's work both as a leader -- his recent disc Awake is an excellent place to start if you don't know his stuff -- and also as a member of Guillermo Klein's badass 12-piece band Los Gauchos. (Miguel is kind of famous in NYC jazz circles for playing long, complex stretches of Guillermo's dense, rhythmically contorted compositions with his eyes closed. It's been confessed to me that his apparently effortless total recall makes the other guys in the Gauchos sax section feel a bit nervous.)

Zenón was an inspired choice for the MacArthur, and fully deserves the honor. But beyond the satisfaction of seeing such a high-profile award go to an artist I admire, the symbolism of this choice is powerful and is worth considering for a moment. Miguel is the perfect example of the kind of new mainstream, post-Jazz Wars player I was talking about in my NewMusicBox piece -- someone to whom the old ideological battles between avant-gardists and traditionalists, fusioneers and purists, etc., seem completely retarded.

Previous MacArthurs given to jazz musicians have generally gone to critically respectable members of the avant-garde elite: Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Ken Vandermark, John Zorn, etc.^[1] No disrespect intended to these trailblazing masters, but I am heartened that this year the MacArthur brain trust had the cojones to give the award to a musician who is still in his early thirties. (Miguel is the youngest jazz musician to ever receive a MacArthur.)

Bluntly -- I am tired of awards that seem to be all about bolstering the reputation of the award itself (and by extension, the wealthy donors who support it) by throwing impressive piles of money at long-established, world-famous artists who, frankly, are not hurting for either cash or critical recognition. (A recent case in point.)  I am even more tired of the idea that jazz musicians in their twenties and thirties are unworthy inheritors -- that only the old masters (and those who hew slavishly to long-established styles) are worthy of serious consideration. And I am sick to death of people asking "Where is the new Charlie Parker?" or "Where is the new John Coltrane?" I suspect those doing the asking are the very same people who would have plugged their ears in horror at the unfamiliar sounds coming out of Bird's horn in 1945 (when he was 25 years old) or Trane's in 1955 (when he was 29).

Peter Hum, in his post on Miguel's "genius grant," observed that two of the greatest living geniuses in jazz, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, have yet to be singled out for MacArthur honors. This is true. And, in some sense, lamentable -- perhaps especially in Shorter's case, as he is having his most creatively fertile decade since the 1960's and his current working quartet (which includes comparative youngster Brian Blade) is arguably the best band in jazz right now. But as I wrote in the comments over at Peter's place, when you are handing out a half-million dollars with no strings attached, I think you ought to take more than just merit into account. I think you ought to think about the effect that kind of money and recognition will have on someone's career and future artistic output.

Does anyone believe that an extra $100,000 per year in disposable income over the next five years would make a significant difference to the kind of music Herbie Hancock or Wayne Shorter or [insert Established Jazz Genius here] is going to produce going forward? These guys are already in a position to do whatever the hell they want, and that is exactly what they have been doing. (If Herbie decides he wants to work with Christina Aguilera, it's not because he needs the gig to keep the wolf from the door.)

But -- if you will allow me to channel Captain Obvious for a moment -- half a mil over five years makes an enormous difference to a 31-year old musician who is still largely unknown even to most Down Beat subscribers -- let alone the musical community at large. All of a sudden, Zenón has the freedom to not devote every single waking moment to figuring out how to hustle up this month's rent. All of a sudden, he has options. He can pick and choose his projects. He can afford to turn down lucrative but artistically unrewarding gigs. He can afford to take more than three days in the studio to record his next album, and he can make that record as expansive and ambitious as he chooses. He can decide how much or how little teaching he wants to do. He can go anywhere in the world to research indigenous music and play with the locals. Or he could flee the NYC perma-hustle and spend a few months in remote isolation. Whatever his choices, the important thing is that now he actually has them. The MacArthur Fellowship is going to have a profound impact on the nature of the work Zenón is able to pursue over the next five years, and probably well beyond. It seems to me that this ought to be the whole point of handing out these kinds of big-money awards -- to reshape the artistic landscape by vastly expanding the opportunities available to artists who are still struggling, every day, just to be heard.

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1. (Regina Carter is the outlier.)

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PS 1988 MacArthur Fellow and certifiable genius Ran Blake is playing a rare, free NYC show this Friday at the Third Street Music School Settlement. RSVP via email.

It's money that I love

Somehow, this recent bulk email eluded my spam filters:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We can not directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to [email protected] so that we may speedily transfer your commision for this transaction. After I receive that information I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

(Actually, this came my way courtesy of Billionaires for Bush, who also have spawned the spinoff group Lobbyists for McCain.)

EDIT: This seems to have originated here.

What we are saying is, you’d better put our country first, you merde-heads, or soon there will be so much lipstick on your pit bulls it will make your berets spin!

Long live George Saunders.

[via M. C—]

I never thought I'd make a killing on some guy's "integrity."

The peerless Self-Styled Siren has a wonderful post up about one of my favorite films, Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. The one bit she neglects to mention is one of the movie's hippest and most authentic details: Marty Milner's character plays a jazz guitarist in the 1957 Chico Hamilton Quintet -- who appear in the film as themselves! This was a very unusual and innovative group for the time, with the leader on drums, Paul Horn on woodwinds, Fred Katz on cello(!), Carson Smith on bass, and Marty Milner standing in for Jim Hall. Here is the fantastic jazz club scene from the film:

I am not what you see and hear

Isaac Butler on DFW in Buzzline.

Signal Ensemble @ LPR, 13 Sept 2008

Signal Ensemble^[1] is the latest and largest assemblage of youngish NYC new music all-stars, a team-up band featuring the entirety of So Percussion alongside players from Alarm Will Sound, Gutbucket, and various other  avant-classical groups -- basically a kind of Legion of Superheroes for the Bang on a Can crowd. Signal in fact made their official debut at this year's Bang On A Can Marathon, and last Saturday was their first NYC solo show, in the new home for the Wordless Music series, Le Poisson Rouge. In case you are keeping track, this is a major new American chamber orchestra whose initial New York appearances have taken place in a shopping center and a nightclub.

Signal are, so far, heavily invested in performing the music of Steve Reich -- they did his "Daniel" Variations at the Marathon, a whole mess of Reich rep out west at the Ojai Festival, and on Saturday and Sunday at LPR, they paired a recent piece, You Are (Variations), with the work pretty much everyone considers to be Reich's masterpiece, 1976's Music for 18 Musicians. Chances are that if you know only one piece of classical music written by a living American composer, this is the one you know.

I would hazard a guess that most of the musicians in Signal grew up listening to Music for 18 Musicians in pretty heavy rotation. Some of them would probably not even be classical musicians today had they not encountered that piece during their formative years. But the thing about Music for 18 is, it requires a completely different skill set than the the one music most classical musicians train so very hard to develop. There's no conductor, for starters, which is unusual for a piece with this many players involved, and especially for one that requires such intricate rhythmic coordination. There are a ton of open-ended repeats, so it's on the players to decide when it's time to cue the next section. There are phrases whose length depends on how long the musicians can sustain a single breath. But the thing that makes Music for 18 unlike the overwhelming majority of the classical music that came before it is that the overall aesthetic effect depends almost entirely on the musicians' understanding of and command over the emotional consequences of nuanced rhythmic placement in relationship to a steady pulse. Another way of saying the same thing is that the players need to know how to groove for the piece to sound good.

The parts in Music for 18 are written in such a way that everyone in the group is required to take personal responsibility for the time. Not just for their own internal time feel -- which has to be unyieldingly solid and precise, but also relaxed, unforced -- but also, their ears have to be open to the aggregate of everyone else's time feel. The players need to stay constantly focused and engaged in what is effectively an hour-long conversation amongst themselves about where the time currently is and where it ought to be.

[Think of it like this: imagine a group of 18 people standing in a circle, each holding a magnet. There's a small iron sphere in the middle of the circle, maybe a little smaller than a golf ball. If all of the magnets are positioned just right, then the combination of those 18 magnetic fields is sufficient to lift the iron ball up off the ground and keep it hovering there in midair. That is what you are trying to do. Robots could do this; they could be programmed to first move the magnets in just the right way to raise the ball, and then to keep it aloft and stable by holding each magnet perfectly steady in the perfect position relative to the ball and to the other magnets. Humans being humans, though, keeping the iron ball floating and centered requires both intricate communication and constant tiny adjustments -- you see the ball twitch in one direction, so you move your magnet ever-so-slightly to compensate... and then someone else is forced to compensate for the way you just moved your magnet by adjusting their magnet, and so on. If anyone moves too far or too fast, or too slow or not fast enough, or simply loses their concentration, then the delicate equilibrium will be broken and the iron ball will go flying off, or clattering to the floor, and it's all over.]

Anyway, sustaining an ongoing conversation about the time isn't something that most classical musicians are even aware they might need to do at some point -- especially not in the context of maintaining a collectively locked-in, stable, trancelike pulse. But it's different for the players in Signal -- for most of them, Reich's music wasn't something new and alien and suspiciously un-classical, involving a whole set of heretofore unfamiliar skills they needed to sweat and toil to acquire. Music for 18 was already an established part of the classical music landscape back when they were first getting comfortable with their instruments. These are players who must have known from the beginning that if they ever wanted to play that kind of music, well then obviously they would have to get their groove together.

Signal has their groove together, without question. The results are inspiring, often breathtaking -- the vibraphone fanfares that herald each new section were so deep in the pocket, so right, that they made me giddy. It's undeniable that this is how Steve Reich's music was always meant to be played. It's exciting be in a time and a place where so many young classical players have become fully engaged with the art of the groove.

The opening work, You Are (Varitations), was performed under the direction of Signal padrone Brad Lubman, who worked the air with big gestures and Jet Li-like precision, totally unfazed by the occasional audience member bearing drinks squeezing past right behind him. Reich has said that You Are is a bit of an intentional throwback to his earlier works, but I actually don't hear it that way. Unlike Music for 18, You Are is dense with time-signature shifts, and harmonically it really stretches the boundaries of Reich's usual pan-modalism, with lots of crunchy, tightly-packed sonorities, and even the occasional burst of implied polytonality. It doesn't have the epic sweep and hypnotic warmth of the earlier work, but Reich's interlocking rhythmic structures have recently become much more intricate and complex without sacrificing their immediacy. It's clear that despite what some of his critics have alleged, Reich hasn't been spinning his wheels. Even when he's (in his own words) "not trying to consciously do something new," the results are quite distinct from his earlier output.

Melissa Hughes is one of the singers in Signal. She has posted an inside look at this gig on her blog. You should read it.

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1. Warning: Signal's website is absurdly difficult to navigate due to some pretentious web designer's notion that scroll bars are, like, Diabolus in Folio or something.

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More pics below the fold...

Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile

Max Fisher at the Plank has assembled a compendium of David Foster Wallace's reportage, essays, and fiction currently available online.

RIP David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace, originally uploaded by Steve Rhodes.

Awful, awful news. My sincerest condolences to those who loved him. (God, his poor wife... )

It's hard to know how to even begin to express how important David Foster Wallace was to my artistic development, and how much joy his writing has brought me.

I came to DFW's work via Infinite Jest, right when it came out in 1996. I basically devoured the damn thing -- I've never read a book so quickly or avidly in my life. And when I was finished, I read it again immediately, all 1079 pages. Officially obsessed, I began voraciously consuming his interviews, short stories ("Lyndon" is probably my favorite short story of all time), essays, his flawed but fascinating first novel... I joined the David Foster Wallace listserv, and had a few real-life encounters with people in that virtual community, back when that sort of thing was still a novelty. I became a kind of evangelist for Infinite Jest, basically forcing the book on the people I was close to, with surprisingly decent results. (Pretty much everyone I know who started it ended up loving it.) And, of course, I eventually ended up writing a tune inspired by one of Infinite Jest's infamous endnotes -- and, more generally, by DFW's brilliantly discursive style.

I thought it was interesting that David Foster Wallace's name came up again in this summer's complexity wars. As I alluded to at the time, reading DFW caused a radical shift in my thinking about art. His writing was vivid, undeniable proof that you could be simultaneously erudite and accessible, experimental and addictively entertaining, structurally complex and heartrendingly sincere, high-minded and embracing of pop culture, and seriously fucking funny. His best work (Infinite Jest, the stories in Girl With Curious Hair, the longform essays) remains an inspiration and a constant reminder of the ways in which I need to shape up my game.

I saw David Foster Wallace read at the Strand back in January 2006. He is someone who has written about depression with acute insight, from a place of obsessive familiarity -- his story "The Depressed Person" is brutal and unflinching -- but from all surface appearances, he seemed long past that dark period. He was at ease in front of the packed house, thoroughly charming and engaging. He did not seem at all the tortured, self-destructive, inward-looking type. He was married, well-established, from all reports he loved his teaching gig, he was sought-after by magazines and publishers, worshipped by younger writers... I never would have expected this from him.

I still can't quite grasp that his voice is gone. For years, I've been hoping for a third David Foster Wallace novel. I guess I'll give Infinite Jest another go-round instead. For a book that is so wickedly funny and entertaining, it's also ultimately very sad, with an ending left deliberately, almost cruelly unresolved.

UPDATE: I remember being really knocked out by Laura Miller's interview with DFW in Salon back when it was first published. It's still my favorite interview with him. She has written a beautiful tribute:

He talked about how difficult it was to be a novelist in a world seething with advertisements and entertainment and knee-jerk knowingness and facile irony. He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism -- because not even the most merciless self- examination can ignore the probability that you are simultaneously congratulating yourself for your soul-searching, that you are posing. He tried so hard to be sincere and to attend to the world around him because he was excruciatingly aware of how often we are merely "sincere" and "attentive" and all too willing to leave it at that. He spoke of the discipline and of the abrading, daily labor such efforts require because the one imperative that runs throughout all of his work is the intimate connection between humility and wisdom.

Read the whole thing.

Take your reactions as coming attractions

My comrades, hearken to us as we unveil Secret Society's autumnal campaign:

SUNDAY, OCT. 12 - We shall be performing a brief set as part of the long-running All Nite Soul jazz festival at St. Peter's Church (619 Lex @ 53rd). Indeed -- your eyes do not decieve you, the powers-that-be actually intend to vouchsafe our entrance into a g-dd-mn'd church. (My co-conspirators and I, inveterate sinners that we are, impeach you to pray for our immortal souls, lest divine wrath strike us down afore we cross the threshold.) This will be a rare opportunity to hear the Society with a completely new rhtyhm section: Ike Sturm (who is also organizing the festival) on bass, and Ted Poor on drums. We are scheduled to hit around 10 o'clock PM.

SUNDAY, NOV. 9 - The Society returns to one of our most-frequented haunts, the Bowery Poetry Club. We shall take the stage at 7:30 PM or thereabouts to reignite the flame of steampunk bigband on the Bowery.

FRIDAY DEC. 12 & SATURDAY DEC. 13 - It is our great honor to inaugurate the Jazz Gallery's Large Ensemble Series. This season, they have comissioned new bigband music from Gregg August, David Binney, John Ellis, Pedro Giraudo, Jason Lindner, Sherisse Rogers, Josh Roseman, Yosvany Terry, and myself. Needless to say, I am humbled to be included amongst such heady company, and I hope I will be seeing you at the Gallery for all of this exciting new music.

Additional details for all of these events will be announced soon -- watch this space.

I'm trapped in a world before later on

There's an overwhelming volume of great shows coming up in the next few weeks.

The above photo is from Donny McCaslin's Aug. 27 trio hit at the 55 Bar, which was seriously one of the best things I have seen all year. I've been avidly listening to Donny live and on record for almost fifteen years now and I've never heard him sound like that. As you probably know, he has a terrific new album out on Greenleaf -- there are some streaming tracks here -- but this is really the kind of music that needs be experienced live. (Especially if you are under the mistaken impression that the saxophone trio is a played-out lineup.) The bassist on the 55 Bar hit was Ricky Rodriguez, who knocked it out of the park in his first-ever gig with Donny. He and Ted Poor are doing the "official" record release hit with Donny at Jazz Standard on Sept. 30.

Donny's label-mate and my fellow Canadian, bassist Michael Bates, is doing his own record launch, at Cornelia St. this Saturday, Sept. 13. He's joined by Quinsin Nachoff, a fantastic saxophonist and colleague of mine from way back when.

Also this Saturday, it's opening day of FONT (the Festival of New Trumpet Music), paying tribute to cult trumpet god Wadada Leo Smith. FONT runs through Sept. 28 and is brought to you by Greenleaf honcho Dave Douglas, and I've said before, it has by far the best programming of any jazz festival in New York, and is not to be slept on. Tons of great new music coming up at Cornelia St. (including Nabaté Isles) and LPR (including a sweet Avishai Cohen/Amir ElSaffar double-bill), while the Jazz Standard has Society co-conspirators Ingrid Jensen and Tim Hagans paying tribute to the tragic great Woody Shaw. Plus a trumpet-saturated Anti-Social Music afternoon at St. Marks Church called (naturally) "ASM Blows!!"

And also also this Saturday we have NYC new music supergroup Signal (who made their debut at this year's Bang on a Can Marathon) doing an all-Reich Wordless show at LPR. Hmm, all of my favorite NYC new music hotshots together in the same band, playing Music for 18 and You Are in a club? What could possibly be done to improve this situation? (Well, honestly, draught beer that costs less than $7/pint, but you know, Art requires certain sacrifices.)

You can spark it up and I'ma put you out

George Will can go fuck a fire hose. Seriously.

David Sirota:

In a column about underfinanced municipal pension systems today, Will expresses deep anger that veteran police, firefighters and municipal workers eventually get paid well for their services. In one California town on San Francisco Bay, Will tells us that - gasp! - "after just five years, all police and firefighters are guaranteed lifetime health benefits." The horror.

[…]

Indeed, Will would have us believe it is a moral outrage that firefighters and policemen risking life and limb have the nerve to form unions and negotiate pay and benefits packages that are a tiny fraction of what a run-of-the-mill investment banker gets paid. Their outrage may seem like an obscene joke - but it's not. This is what today's aristocrats are really angry about.

Rick Perlstein:

May I point out as an addendum to David's excellent post below that George Will chose to run his column about how firefighters don't deserve pensions on... September 11?

Oh, yeah: and the tasteful headline? "Pension Time Bomb."

Dive down deep down to save my head

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the incomparable Giblets:

Well there's a brand new political superstar on the scene and she's tough as nails and the media won't leave her alone and she's a rough-and-tumble Alaskan hockey mom and why are they asking all these questions and she is the pure reincarnation of the invincible Anglo-Saxon frontier earth mother and stop picking on her!

Read the whole thing.

When I look around me, I can't believe what I see

IAJE may be dead and buried, but the Canadian branch, CAJE, is soldiering on. And, um, they decided to give me an award:

Thank you very much for your submission to the 2008 SOCAN/IAJE Canada Phil Nimmons Jazz Composers Awards.

The winning 2008 Award recipients have been chosen and they are Mike Mallone - Phil Nimmons Established Composer Award, and Darcy James Argue - Emerging Composer Award.

There's a commission and premiere associated with the award... normally this happens at the main IAJE conference, but since that's no longer an option, they are working on some kind of alternate arrangement. Anyway, I am humbled and grateful -- it's an honor.

In other jazzcanada news, I have contributed a chapter to Brian Lillos's Jazz Pedagogy: A Canadian Perspective. My chapter is, as you may have intuited, part of "Unit 6: Contemporary Jazz Composition," alongside contributions by Secret Society North co-conspirators Christine Jensen and Lina Allemano, as well as many other worthy artists.

It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means

God, the Ian McShane narration for this clip really is like the sprinkles on a donut made of pure win:

Blame Canada

Overall, the Canadian election system is far more rational than the insanity that prevails 'round these parts. Canada has uniform national voting standards, a nonpartisan national elections commission, and best of all, no goddamn voting machines. (Canada uses paper ballots, marked with a pencil, all hand-counted, with results usually available on election night.) But there is one important way in which Canadian election law sucks serious ass:

If your date of departure from Canada was five or more years ago, you are not eligible to vote unless you meet one of the following criteria.

You are exempt from the five-year limit if you are posted outside Canada as:

a. an employee of a federal or provincial public administration; or

b. an employee of an international organization of which Canada is a member and to which Canada contributes; or

c. a person who lives with an elector described in a. or b. above, or with a member of the Canadian Forces, or with a civilian employed as a teacher or as administrative support staff in a Canadian Forces school

As far as I know, all US citizens retain the right to vote in US elections by absentee ballot regardless of how long they have been outside the US. Hell, some states even allow US citizens born abroad who have never even set foot in the United States to vote. Meanwhile, I now find myself a man without a franchise. Which kind of bites because here I'd been thinking I'd actually be able to vote in an election this fall after all.

UPDATE: Caitlin Smith sent me this link. I approve.

We are doing this because we don’t like this government. We don’t like their priorities, we don’t like their values, we don’t like their secrecy, we don’t like the many cuts to many of our allies and we don’t like the cuts to the arts. We are not doing this because we want more art, we’re doing this because we want to live in a better world.

Be a professional

Again -- there are no words:

A lot of people were asking tonight: what the hell was that mansion up behind John McCain tonight during the first part of the speech? As I noted below, the TV close-ups only showed McCain's head against the grass in the picture, which made it look like he was reprising his famed green screen performance. And when they panned out, it looked like McCain was showing off one of his mansions.

Well, several readers have written in to tell me that the building is actually the main building on the campus of the Walter Reed Middle School [emphasis added] in North Hollywood, California.

[...]

I'm surprised this hadn't occurred to me. But several readers have suggested that perhaps one of the tech geeks charged with setting up the audio/visual bells and whistles for the evening was tasked with getting pictures of Walter Reed Army Medical Center [emphasis added] but goofed and got this instead. At first I thought, No, that's ridiculous. This is a major political party with big time professionals putting this together. Nothing is left to chance. I mean, is this the RNC or a scene out Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman? I still have a bit of a hard time believing they're quite that incompetent.

Really, Josh? This is the campaign that only started vetting their VP choice after they announced her. You really have a hard time believing they screwed this up, too?

Don't believe everything that you breathe

I don't have a teevee machine, so maybe y'all can tell me... is Jon Stewart the only person on national television to actually mention the insane police tactics in St. Paul during the RNC?

If you haven't seen what's been going on in St. Paul over the past few days, check out this unbelievable footage of police moving in on demonstrators last night, courtesy of WCCO. Here's what's happening: police are ordering everyone on the street onto the bridge above I-94. Then they announced that everyone on the bridge was under arrest.

Wondering why St. Paul does not appear concerned about getting the pants sued off of them for such blatantly illegal police behavior? (As happened following the previous Republican convention?)

Here's your answer:

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Taxpayers should be off the hook for any damages stemming from claims of police misconduct related to the Republican National Convention under a first-of-its-kind agreement.

The deal required the Republican Party's host committee to buy insurance covering up to $10 million in damages and unlimited legal costs for law enforcement officials accused of brutality, violating civil rights and other misconduct.

Who could have possibly predicted that such an arrangement would lead police to act like they had carte blanche to engage in brutality, civil rights violations, and other misconduct?

Let's flip the track, bring the old school back

Gov. Palin's spiteful dig against Obama's days as a community organizer have -- deservedly -- drawn a lot of heat from a lot of different corners. Jay Smooth has a good video response, but the most badass judo-flip rebuttal comes from John Raskin, founder of the Community Organizers of America:

Community organizers work in neighborhoods that have been hit hardest by the failing economy. The last thing we need is for Republican officials to mock us on television when we’re trying to rebuild the neighborhoods they have destroyed. Maybe if everyone had more houses than they can count, we wouldn’t need community organizers. But I work with people who are getting evicted from their only home. If John McCain and the Republicans understood that, maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to make fun of community organizers like me.

Attention Obama campaign: more like that, please.

[h/t dday]

So this ain't the end

I don't know what's more insane -- that the McCain campaign has decided to use Heart's "Barracuda" as Sarah Palin's theme song, or that Heart is trying to stop them.

I understand that like every other musician on the planet, Heart doesn't want their music associated with the McCain/Palin ticket in any way, shape, or form. But truly, I can think of no more appropriate song to play every time the GOP's self-described(!) "pitbull in lipstick," "Sarah Barracuda" (her actual highschool nickname!) takes the stage:

And if the real thing don't do the trick
You better make up something quick
You gonna burn, burn, burn, burn, burn it to the wick
Ooooh, barracuda!

[h/t Jane Hamsher]

You know what it's all about

Timing is everything.

WASHINGTON -- Jack A. Abramoff, the once-powerful Republican super-lobbyist, was sentenced today to 48 months in prison for his role in a corruption scandal that rocked Congress and the Bush administration.

U.S. District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle pronounced the sentence as a tearful Abramoff stood before her with his lawyers this afternoon in a courtroom that included both victims and family members.

The sentence was far below the 121 months that Abramoff could have received under federal sentencing guidelines but more than either the Justice Department or his lawyers had requested.

Huvelle said Abramoff deserved the sharp reduction in sentence because of his help in aiding prosecutors pursue other targets in the lobbying scandal.

Excellent.

The police state is too busy and the neighborhood's getting out of hand

David Neiwert talks to former FBI agent and current ACLU counsel Michael German, who says things that in a sane world would go without saying:

I don’t pretend that there aren’t people out there who have bad intentions on their minds. But if you can’t distinguish someone whose program is about videotaping protests as opposed to somebody whose program is going out and lighting things on fire, that’s problematic for the rest of us. Because if the police aren’t distinguishing between those two in their use of force, then none of us are safe.

[...]

The idea that just because someone is pointing a camera at you, you have the right to take the camera away or destroy the film or the tape – which is something we’ve had documented – you know, that’s not part of policing. That they would feel they have the power to do that is troubling.

Read the whole thing.

And while you're add it, check out Ian Walsh's take -- he's right that the current abuses are part of a disturbing, systemic large-scale pattern that doesn't get a lot of play, absent a big political convention to hang the story on:

So a society which is really concerned about liberty and freedom has to watch its cops very carefully. They can't be allowed to get out of control, to forget that they exist to serve civilians, not to shove civilians around. In the US the evidence is that the line has been crossed. This happens so regularly now that it's just expected. It's hardly commented on in the press, despite being the exact same behavior that has the press so excited and outraged when it happens in other countries like China. No major politician can be bothered to call it out as inappropriate. It's just the new normal.

You better set the mic down

Today's YouTube hilarity via Talking Points Memo:

After talking her up on-air, GOP strategists Peggy Noonan tell you what they actually think of McCain's veep pick.

Josh Marshall has the full transcript. I can't stop laughing at how thoroughly resigned Peggy is:

"It's over."

Payne Avenue lives up to its name some nights

Police, originally uploaded by Lindsay Beyerstein.

The St. Paul Police Department is way out of line. L. is in the Twin Cities, having gone out there with the purpose of covering the GOP convention for FireDogLake's Campaign Silo, but the real story has turned out to be the action on the streets of St. Paul, especially the totally disproportionate police response to citizen protest -- preemptive raids on a legal aid collective, reporters assaulted and arrested, Donna Brazille pepper sprayed, mass arrests... as Glenn Greenwald observed, didn't we just finish condemning China for imprisoning protesters during the Olympics?

The widespread crackdown against peaceful protesters during the 2004 RNC in New York was shameful, but Minneapolis-St. Paul 2008 is shaping up to be even worse. And what with Preznit Bush's sly reference to the "angry left" tonight, you'd almost think the authorities were deliberately trying to provoke unrest with their heavy-handed tactics. (It's not like there's no precedent for that.) [UPDATE: Sara Robinson shares my suspicions.]

Amidst all of this antidemocratic insanity, I can't even find it in myself to take any grim satisfaction in the poetic justice inherent in this vignette:

There was a photographer right next to me who was also taken down pretty violently. He was screaming he was press, as well. He had credentials. He kept saying he was a photographer for the New York Post. And quite funnily, he said, “For Christ’s sake, it’s a Republican paper!” But that didn’t seem to matter.

L. is on the story -- check her photostream and regular dispatches for FireDogLake. And Salon's Glenn Greenwald has a comprehensive rundown.

Don't think twice, it's all right

There are no words for this.

ST. PAUL — A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

[...]

Aides to Mr. McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska now [emphasis added] to look more thoroughly into Ms. Palin’s background.

Your conventional notions of temporality-as-usual are nothing to John McCain. You might think that a candidate who only initiates the vetting process in earnest after he announces his running mate is "desperate" or "reckless" or "insane," but that's only because your puny minds are unable to comprehend that just as John McCain is a maverick who exists above partisan politics, he also exists above the march of time itself.