Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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April 4, 2012Shooting verminWhen we first started a garden at our beloved Sycamore Barn in Norfolk 25 years ago, I bought an air rifle and commenced to killing rabbits, which raise hell in a garden. The first year or so I was shooting them I must have killed two dozen. Each year after that it was much harder, as though they could always hear me coming; I concluded that I must have killed all the stupid ones first.
Con Coughlin, an editor at the Daily Telegraph in London, writes in today's Wall Street Journal that "about two-thirds of al Queda's original leadership have been killed or captured during the past decade." He quotes Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, saying that we "have killed all the slow and stupid ones." There are still hundreds more in the area; too bad Bush dropped the ball there so he could invade Iraq. Our carrots won't be safe in our lifetime.
April 4, 2012Goopy musicSitting in the waiting room at a garage yesterday morning waiting for my truck to pass its annual inspections for safety and emissions, there was a TV playing a weather channel, with constant jazz-rock or smooth jazz or whatever it was, saxophone players with nothing to say accompanied by a popcrock beat, something like Fourplay I guess. I picked up a copy of the Morning Call and started laughing out loud as I read the article on the front page. All the buildings operated by Northampton County have gone quiet because the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers kept pestering them to pay for the non-music they play in every public place. Even callers on hold with county offices now hear just silence.
County Executive John Stoffa said, "Out of the blue one day in my mail was this letter [...] I'd never heard of it before." A county official responsible for inflicting noise pollution on everyone has never heard of ASCAP: well, that doesn't really surprise me. He had tried to ignore the problem, "because I thought these people might go away," but that didn't work, so he turned the music off. For $2,343 (based on the country's population) he could have purchased a license to broadcast junk music that nobody asked for in the first place, but he didn't do that, because that would have equalled the property taxes of three residents: "That's how I thought about it. I think about my neighbors." But what about the taxpayers who don't want to be assaulted by junk music every time they enter one of their own buildings? "We have to come up with something because we don't want dead silence." Why don't we? Who needs the music? How did we do without it for centuries before electricity was discovered?
Why can't our public servants stop and think?
So yesterday afternoon I went to work in the shopping mall on a lovely sunny day, and not for the first time I thought that the area of the outdoor shops built there several years ago is really quite nicely designed, in its anodyne way, but spoiled by the broadcast of tinny, irritating popcrock of the worst kind, anonymous adolescents wailing about their aching loins accompanied by mechanical rhythm sections from speakers on posts, just like in totalitarian countries: "You vill not escape ziss trashy noise!"
The Lehigh Valley Mall's attached outdoor area is described as a "LifeStyle Center".
April 4, 2012Peter Pullman's book about Bud Powell"The parallel world, of the times when musicians just hung out and shared musical ideas, was a much larger one than that in which the records were made or the nightclub gigs took place."
Peter Pullman's Wail! The life of Bud Powell, which I mentioned here recently, is already one of the best jazz biographies I have ever read, and I'm not even a third of the way through it. Powell was a profoundly troubled genius, and being beaten over the head by cops and having electroshock therapy didn't help. Gene Benedetti was going around recording Charlie Parker with portable equipment in nightclubs, and Thelonious Monk lived long enough to make quite a few albums on Columbia, as well as recording concerts, but we have relatively little of Powell's brilliance: onstage he was intensely, maniacally brilliant, in another universe, but nobody was recording him. He could not/ would not even hold conversations with other people, except other musicians on his level, but Pullman has painted a picture of a magical era, even discovering witnesses to the scene that we've never heard of because they did not pursue musical fame. He brings the whole exciting era to life so well that our hearts ache at what we have lost.
Pullman wrote the book (and conducted the interviews) for the excellent booklet that accompanied the 5-CD set The Complete Bud Powell on Verve that appeared back in 1994, and having done that he couldn't stop; after all these years' work he has created a classic. I am one of those who would rather have a physical book to read, but with this download Pullman has been able to do without the whole rigmarole of agent, publisher and all the rest, and he has created a classic, a great bargain at the price.