I Scored
Friday, August 31st, 2007
Now Marge can’t boast to me about her sign anymore.
Archive for August, 2007
Jazz Friday
Friday, August 31st, 2007
At some point between 1998 and 2000 when I was living in Santa Barbara I would go down to LA to visit friends on a regulas basis. On one of these trips my friend, Gary Palmer, was to hang paintings for a poetry reading at some place off Crenshaw in the heart of the black community of LA. Gary is from Balfast, and pretty sensitive to issues of cultural differences. I could tell he was uncomfortable as we walked around. At one point I was going to buy a book from a street vendor of African folk tales when next to it I saw a book called “Kill Whitey”…at that point I understood why Gary was anxious to move up the street. We went into this Mexican place that was a complete anomaly and ate. Afterwards, we were walking back to the car and this guy comes out of this place and says: “Where are you guys going? There’s some great jazz in here!” I walked right in to a place called “The World Stage”. Gary came in a short while later.
It was a small, spare room with an unassuming stage up front, on which there was a group of guys playing. In front of the stage was about ten rows of folding chairs, filled with people of all ages and colors–most of which had their own instruments. It was Sunday, and Sunday’s are open mic days at “The World Stage”, and many of these people were visibly annoyed that this group of guys were up there hogging the stage. I learned that the guy on drums was some guy named Billy Higgins, and the guy in the colorful hat on saxaphone was some guy named Charles LLoyd.
I was mesmerized by the music. I had not really listened to jazz before but being in that space I was able to really feel the magic of it, and really be in the music. I was completely taken in even though I wasn’t really sure what I was taking in. There was a small bowl to donate at the door and I put in what I had. I can’t remember if I was able to buy this cd there or if I bought in later, but this was the first jazz cd I ever bought.
It made me late to visit with my dad that day before going back up to Santa Barbara. Being a big jazz guy, I asked him about these guys. Billy Higgins is a legend (recently deceased) of jazz and can be heard on many of the most important jazz albums recorded. Charles Lloyd had been more or less off the jazz scene for twenty or thirty years after “Forest Flower”, and was going to be performing at The Jazz Bakery that night–they must have been warming up and just jamming at “The World Stage”, which was co-founded by Billy Higgins as a community outreach space. All in all I happened on to one of those rare events that can’t be replicated or made to happen even if you tried. My dad was very jealous.
…and that, dear friends, is how I started being interested in jazz.
Skibby Arguing With the Ref At Black Dog
Friday, August 31st, 2007
He missed his start time after being detained by the police for reasons he wouldn’t elaborate on. http://www.startribune.com/crime/story/1391164.htm l
Art Friday
Friday, August 31st, 2007Best novel read in 2007:
Tolstoy begins “Anna Karenina” with: “Every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way”.
Merot starts “Mammals” with: “Every model family should have a fuck-up: a family without a fuck-up is not truly a family, because it lacks an element that challenges it, thereby reinforcing its legitimacy”. –staking claim to a contemporary accounting of the human experience. The protagonist–”The Uncle”–goes on to say that:
he wishes his mother would pursue her obsession with disease and her tedious blather in the realm of the dead. Not that a splinter is so easily removed from the soul, but the physical passing of a person certainly has distinct advantages.
The uncle has chalked up a number of fuck-ups that serve to reassure the family in their own just and noble life chices: unemployment, divorce, adsence of decendants, cohabitating with divorcees, abortive attempts to fit into single-parent families, etc..
The novel essentially follows The Uncle through his life as accounted by him in a sort of anthropological view of human behavior. Sabotaging family units, tedious work-place environments, relationships that are failed before they begin, and the overall banality of modern life in which the individual plays more of a role than anything else renders The Uncle more-or-less impotent and bitter, though hilarious.
The Uncle on employment:
Work is one of the principal causes of misery, the other is love.
The preamble to the Constitution of the Fourth Republic, still in effect states, “Everyone shall have the duty to work and the right to obtain employment.” Luckily, unemployment turned up to challenge this hypocrisy.
A handful of assholes terrorize the whole planet through work. The worst offenders are the people who have no financial or political motive. Intense feelings of frustration turn them into workaholics and they cannot bear people who aren’t like them This is a phenomenon that affects every level of humanity. Listen to a Portuguese foreman yelling from a scaffolding rig: he is a vicious, uncultivated animal, and the world would be a better place if someone pushed him off.
The Uncle on the ruling class:
What is a CEO? A CEO is someone who would like you to work twelve hours a day for the price of six. He criticizes the state and the government while going cap in hand to them for subsidies. His bidet factory exists only to fund the lavish lifestyle of his family of morons. All of his children have their own cars, fail their baccalaureat three times, spend long periods in the United States, and look down their noses at you.
The Uncle on democracy:
What is democracy? It is one more on the list of things that make you throw up. In a democratic country, the head of state tells his fellow citizens how much he earns and how much tax he pays. It is a commendable gesture. Among the many possible definitions, a modern democracy is a political system in which prodigiously educated, profoundly lucid, and perfectly disinterested citizens elect a representative who will earn more in a year than most of them will see in a lifetime. Besides which, he’s usually exposed as a crook and jumps bail.
In the Houellebecq school of contemporary French novelists, this is definitely the best novel I have read this year.
