WKCR, Columbia's music station, is playing the music of Cecil Payne tomorrow from 2-7. The sax great died this week. A few minutes ago they played a mind-blowing set from his 1968 album Zodiac, with Kenny Dorham on the trumpet. That is a seriously hot date -- with the kind of live soloing and forward motion you could imagine Jack Kerouac trying to capture in On The Road. At first I thought I was listening to Lee Morgan's Live at the Lighthouse, but if anything this album swings harder. Payne played the baritone, an unusual choice. He had his own sound and his death is a loss to jazz. There is nothing in contemporary American culture that can make up for the recent loss of so many preeminent jazzmen. They are America's true classical composers.

From www.whowalkedinbrooklyn.com...


Cecil Payne of Brooklyn, 1922-2007
Nov 28th, 2007 by admin
The Music Director regrets to announce the death yesterday of baritone saxophone player & flautist Cecil Payne, just weeks shy of his 85th birthday. A native of Brooklyn, Payne is perhaps best known for his early associations with Dizzy Gillespie and a mid-60s one with the towering Randy Weston, also of Brooklyn, & composer of “African Village Bed-Stuy,” among many other great accomplishments. A fuller appreciation of Mr. Payne, his place in jazz, & an unjustly obscure chapter in Brooklyn’s abundant cultural history will be forthcoming. In the meantime, check the library, new & used record stores– anything with Cecil blowing on it of some quality. WWIB’s favorite of Payne’s leader dates is perhaps Zodiac, recorded in 1968, released on the Strata East label in 1973, & dedicated to two of its then deceased players, trumpeter Kenny Dorham & pianist Wynton Kelly– the latter born in Jamaica but raised in… Brooklyn.

WKCR, Columbia's music station, is playing the music of Cecil Payne tomorrow from 2-7. The sax great died this week. A few minutes ago they played a mind-blowing set from his 1968 album Zodiac, with Kenny Dorham on the trumpet. That is a seriously hot date -- the kind of live soloing you could imagine Jack Kerouac tried to sum up in On The Road. At first I thought I was listening to Lee Morgan's Life at the Lighthouse, but if anything this album swings harder. Payne certainly had his own tone and his death is a loss to jazz.

From www.whowalkedinbrooklyn.com...


Cecil Payne of Brooklyn, 1922-2007
Nov 28th, 2007 by admin
The Music Director regrets to announce the death yesterday of baritone saxophone player & flautist Cecil Payne, just weeks shy of his 85th birthday. A native of Brooklyn, Payne is perhaps best known for his early associations with Dizzy Gillespie and a mid-60s one with the towering Randy Weston, also of Brooklyn, & composer of “African Village Bed-Stuy,” among many other great accomplishments. A fuller appreciation of Mr. Payne, his place in jazz, & an unjustly obscure chapter in Brooklyn’s abundant cultural history will be forthcoming. In the meantime, check the library, new & used record stores– anything with Cecil blowing on it of some quality. WWIB’s favorite of Payne’s leader dates is perhaps Zodiac, recorded in 1968, released on the Strata East label in 1973, & dedicated to two of its then deceased players, trumpeter Kenny Dorham & pianist Wynton Kelly– the latter born in Jamaica but raised in… Brooklyn.

Since when was the Democratic nomination supposed to be a coronation? People say of Hillary that it's "her turn" -- actually it's time for the voters to decide.

With two months to go before the Iowa caucus, John Edwards is the man to watch. He upstaged Obama last week by landing all the punches against Hillary during the Democratic debate -- and his punches are landing because they're well placed.

As the Bush administration ratchets up the anti-Iran war rhetoric, voters are finally considering the question Hillary has avoided throughout the "fund-raising race": whether she would prevent our country from entering yet another unjust war.

John Edwards is the only candidate who has fastened on this most crucial topic of the race, and the moral question beneath it: where is Hillary's backbone? An hour ago, he made the following statement to the voters in Iowa:

"Senator Clinton is voting like a hawk in Washington, while talking like a dove in Iowa and New Hampshire. She's giving the administration exactly what it wants again."

And this:

"George Bush, Dick Cheney and the neocon warmongers used 9/11 to start a war with Iraq, now they're trying to use Iraq to start a war with Iran."

If Obama had questioned Hillary's anti-war credentials months ago, he'd be leading in the polls today. He missed his chance, and that's why Edwards is the leading challenger.

As for electability, does anyone seriously believe that this man would lose to Rudy or Mitt?

Nora Ephron on HuffPo:

It's especially hard to remember that the real enemies are the Republicans, when the Democrats tend to break your heart and the Republicans are just the boys you'd never go out with anyway.

It's hard when you watch a debate and decide that in the end you're probably going to throw your vote away in the primary and vote for someone who doesn't have a chance, like Dennis Kucinich. I mean, look at them, look at the front runners: Hillary Clinton, who can't help being Hillary Clinton; Barack Obama, who was a disappointment from the beginning and whose new-found attack mode is as dispiriting as his low energy level used to be; John Edwards, whom I am afraid I will never be able to think of again (after this week's Peggy Noonan column in the Wall Street Journal) as anything but a desperate furry little woodland animal.

William Grimes, whose food criticism cannot be topped, has an interesting piece in today's Times on Jerry Thomas, the "Jupiter Olympus" of the bar and grandfather to today;s leading mixologists and "bar chefs." His signature drink was the Blue Blazer (a favorite of Time founder Briton Hadden), the preparation of which involved throwing. Little is known about Thomas -- but David Wondrich, an Esquire correspondent, has tracked him from New York to California and finally the place where he died, Keoku, Iowa.

Grimes writes:

Thomas himself appears, for the first time, as a living presence: a devotee of bare-knuckle prize fights, a flashy dresser fond of kid gloves, an art collector, a restless traveler usually carrying a fat wad of bank notes and a gold Parisian watch. A player, in short.

And:

As he wandered, he picked up on the latest developments in the art, inventing new cocktails and building a serious following for his particular blend of craftsmanship and showmanship, epitomized in his signature drink, the Blue Blazer, a pyrotechnic showpiece in which an arc of flame passed back and forth between two mixing glasses. At the Occidental, Thomas was earning $100 a week, more than the vice president of the United States. When he died, in 1885, newspapers all over the country observed his passing in substantial obituaries.

I've seen studies saying atheists compose 10 to 15 percent of the population. But you never heard from them until Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens published their books. Now all of the atheists are coming out of the woodwork with their various reasonings and rationales. Here's an essay titled "An Alien God" from the blog Overcoming Bias. It was written by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

"[W]hen you look at all the apparent purposefulness in Nature, rather than picking and choosing your examples, you start to notice things that don't fit the Judeo-Christian concept of one benevolent God. Foxes seem well-designed to catch rabbits. Rabbits seem well-designed to evade foxes. Was the Creator having trouble making up Its mind?

...

When I design a toaster oven, I don't design one part that tries to get electricity to the coils and a second part that tries to prevent electricity from getting to the coils. It would be a waste of effort. Who designed the ecosystem, with its predators and prey, viruses and bacteria? Even the cactus plant, which you might think well-designed to provide water fruit to desert animals, is covered with inconvenient spines.

The ecosystem would make much more sense if it wasn't designed by a unitary Who, but, rather, created by a horde of deities - say from the Hindu or Shinto religions. This handily explains both the ubiquitous purposefulnesses, and the ubiquitous conflicts: More than one deity acted, often at cross-purposes. The fox and rabbit were both designed, but by distinct competing deities. I wonder if anyone ever remarked on the seemingly excellent evidence thus provided for Hinduism over Christianity. Probably not."

But even the Hindus don't have a toaster god.

From Art Forum: an essay on Antonioni by Seymour Chatman. (Thanks to Morgan Meis at 3QuarksDaily):

Here was a director who was not only a serious student of form, color, and mise-en-scene but perhaps the medium's most visionary practitioner. Antonioni's striking frames and at times astonishingly beautiful shots, however, do not distract from but rather intensify his principal preoccupation -- the depiction of the human condition. His art is like Goya's: often sad and unpleasant in content, yet gorgeous in appearance.

And again:

To an unusual degree, Antonioni's art is governed by his keen attention to the ground against which he placed his figures. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Antonioni, with his telephoto lens, flattened things against broad surfaces. Particularly in the '60s, he sought out framing boxes; for instance, to pin Monica Vitti against the wall in L'eclisse and Red Desert. Rothko's signature bisection of the horizontal dimension (and Barnett Newman's of the vertical, and Mondrian's obsession with the whole box) may well have lingered in the filmmaker's mind. (Antonioni once famously compared his work to Rothko's, saying that it is 'about nothing . . . with precision.')

The brightest kid in class is raising his hand -- and standing up to the schoolmarm.

Barack Obama announced today that he will conduct high-level negotiations with Iran if elected President. In one fell swoop, he's turned the weakness of his youth into a strength -- and revealed Hillary Clinton for the hawk that she is. The peace wing of the party cannot stand idly by as Hillary calls Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group, opening the door to a full-scale invasion. Barack, on the other hand, presents a different approach. He will negotiate with anybody:

"In his Democratic presidential bid, Mr. Obama has vigorously sought to distinguish himself on foreign policy from his rivals, particularly Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, by asserting that he would sit down for diplomatic meetings with countries like Iran, North Korea and Syria with no preconditions.

The suggestion, which emerged as a flash point in the campaign, has prompted Mrs. Clinton to question whether such an approach would amount to little more than a propaganda victory for the United States’s adversaries and to question the experience of Mr. Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois."

Hillary will give Barack an F in Foreign Relations. She will call him inexperienced. But to the average voter, it's just common sense to talk to your enemy before bombing them. Unlike Hillary, Barack has an open mind. In a single move, he's identified himself as the candidate for change -- not just home but abroad, too.

He should have been doing this along, but hopefully he's not too late to give us a real race.

Comedy Smack, a new web site created by David Moore, sends you three of the funniest items bouncing around the blogosphere and e-mails them to you every day. Today Comedy Smack quotes Chelsea Peretti, who lots of guys are getting obsessed with in the way that they are with Sarah Silverman. Here's Chelsea on food:

I don't get Vegans. They're like: 'I can't eat products that come from living animals. I like cows and bees and it's not right for us to mistreat them.' What, you like them better than the immigrant workers who pick our vegetables?

Earlier this week I lunched at Tamarind with a prominent executive who proclaimed that The Economist was his favorite read. He never has time to more than scan The New Yorker -- though he must, for work -- but The Economist! The Economist! He reads it cover to cover.

In the last year no fewer than half a dozen people have told me this -- and that's on top of the dozens who say they read The Economist a bit, pick it up sometimes, or even subscribe, and the dozen more who say, while discussing the old Time, that it sounds a lot like The Economist. In fact, a million U.S. readers now subscribe. Why?

Like the old Time, The Economist brings us news from all over the world. It's organized, and it never changes from week to week. We know where we are when we open that magazine and so we have no fear of getting lost. It features crisp, mildly humorous writing (though not nearly as funny as the old Time). And it's not afraid of dispensing OLD NEWS. The Economist is a magazine one can pick up with a sense of safety: here, at last, is all that stuff you're really supposed to know and feel a little bit embarrassed about not having read already. All of which makes The Economist a convenient read -- but that's not why people love it.

People love The Economist because it presents a world view. The editors put "spin on the ball." They are for small government and free markets. They are realists -- more concerned with tactics than moral constructs, except where Communism is concerned. The are "liberal," in the European sense of the word. Whether or not we agree, we enjoy having the news wrapped up and tied in a bow rather than served "raw."

For this reason, I subscribe to The Economist, just as I subscribe to The Nation. But there are times when The Economist's world view borders on the ridiculous -- and I'm surprised people don't discuss this more often. The Economist's grasp of history is not only selective but shaky, its knowledge of the Americas shallow and inhumane. This week's cover story -- "Brains, not bullets. How to fight future wars" -- selects El Salvador as the best example of an American counter-insurgency campaign.)

Then there's "Let them eat Kafka," an article in this week's issue about a new literacy program in Chile. In that most economically liberalized of countries, the new president, Michelle Bachelet, is promoting reading giving 400,000 of the poorest Chilean families a box of books. She selected popular but literary books for the program, including one by Chile's own Isabel Allende, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and Kafka's Metamorphosis.

The cost? Eleven million dollars -- not much to spend considering that hundreds of thousands of people will learn to read and the whole country will focus on great books, spiking everything from library lending traffic to literacy rates. But The Economist manages to find a supposed "critic," a reading-charity spokesperson who compares the book drop to "dropping bank notes out of the sky." She asks: "Who says that a plumber in a poor district of Santiago will actually want to read Kafka?"

To which the obvious answer is: Why not? Did Kafka write something bad about plumbers? Kafka himself didn't have such a great job; he worked in insurance, purely to pay the bills. And if Gregor the bug isn't exactly an Ant and Bee alphabet book, it's still quite entertaining, emotionally affecting, and not at all hard to get through. If a plumber wants to learn the alphabet, he will pick up Allende, or Salinger, or Kafka. It beats The Economist.

Rain Taxi has posted an interested interview with Michael Hardt, co-author, with Antonio Negri, of Empire and Multitude, two books that caused a sensation within the radical left during the invasion of Iraq. Despite all the excitement, few people really read the work, much less understood it. This interview provides a nice outline of Hardt's thinking, and some observations on what it's like to write with a collaborator. For me the most interesting part comes when the interviewer, Leonard Schwartz, asks Hardt to explain the difference between his idea of empire as opposed to the old notion of a "military industrial complex." For Hardt, communications -- a.ka. big media -- plays a central role in today's transnational empire:

LS: You reject the term “military industrial complex” as a piece of language that has outlived its utility, or is not descriptive of the enemy. Can you say what, in the description of “Empire” you just offered, differs from the older notion of a “military industrial complex”?

MH: It used to be much easier to recognize a single locus of power -- if there was a Winter Palace that we could invade, if it was really all coming out of the White House -- if we could locate power in that way, it would make political practice, at least at a conceptual level, very easy. You know who the enemy is. You know where it is. On the other hand, if in fact power, global power, is tending towards this kind of network that we’re describing, it makes it much less clear where to attack or where to stand. It really poses a new challenge for politics. Philosophers like Toni and I, and of course larger social movements and political movements, have been trying for the last ten years to grasp this new de-centered power structure and find ways to challenge it.

LS: In Empire you suggest “Imperial control operates through three global and absolute means: the bomb, money, and ether.” Now we know what the bomb is, and we know what money is, but it’s your third term ‘ether’ that it seems to me is the most important, at least from the point of view of a poetics. You say about this third term:

MH: Ether is the third and final fundamental medium of imperial control. The management of communication, the structuring of the educational system, and the regulation of culture appear today more than ever as sovereign prerogatives. All of this, however, dissolves in the ether. The contemporary systems of communication are not subordinated to sovereignty; on the contrary, sovereignty seems to be subordinated to communication—or actually, sovereignty is articulated through communication systems. In the field of communication, the paradoxes that bring about the dissolution of territorial and/or national sovereignty are more clear than ever.