"Don't be a piano player in a whorehouse"
Too right Mr. Carroll! This is what I'm always on about when I complain about work


Esteemed journalist lectures on ethics
L.A. Times Editor John Carroll spoke about journalism ethics and pseudo-journalism at the Gerlinger Lounge on Thursday.

May 07, 2004


The media industry has been infested by the rise of pseudo-journalists who go against journalism's long tradition to serve the public with accurate information, Los Angeles Times Editor John S. Carroll told a packed room in the Gerlinger Lounge on Thursday.
Carroll delivered the annual Ruhl Lecture, titled "The Wolf in Reporter's Clothing: The Rise of Pseudo-Journalism in America." The lecture was sponsored by the School of Journalism and Communication.

"All over the country there are offices that look like newsrooms and there are people in those offices that look for all the world just like journalists, but they are not practicing journalism," he said. "They regard the audience with a cold cynicism. They are practicing something I call a pseudo-journalism, and they view their audience as something to be manipulated."

In a scathing critique of Fox News and some talk show hosts, such as Bill O'Reilly, Carroll said they were a "different breed of journalists" who misled their audience while claiming to inform them. He said they did not fit into the long legacy of journalists who got their facts right and respected and cared for their audiences.

Carroll cited a study released last year that showed Americans had three main
misconceptions about Iraq: That weapons of mass destruction had been found, a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq had been demonstrated and that the world approved of U.S intervention in Iraq. He said 80 percent of people who primarily got their news from Fox believed at least one of the misconceptions. He said the figure was more than 57 percentage points higher than people who get their news from public news broadcasting.

"How in the world could Fox have left its listeners so deeply in the dark?" Carroll asked.

He added that a difference exists between journalism and propaganda.

As he addressed some of the hard hits journalism has taken in the field of ethics, Carroll noted that anyone could be a journalist because, unlike other fields, journalism had no qualification tests, boards to censure misconduct or a universally accepted set of standards.

However, Carroll said a great depth of feeling remains on the importance of ethics that is centered around newspapers' sense of responsibilities to their readers.

"I've learned that these ethics are deeply believed in even though in some places they are not even written down," he said. When ethical guidelines are ignored, their proponents respond with 'tribal ferocity,'" he added.

"If you stray badly from these rules, you will pay dearly," he said.

He said while much media has ended up "in the gutter," the L.A. Times has a different philosophy and was dedicated to taking the "high road."

"I do think that a lot of newspaper people have made a lot of strategic mistakes," he said. "They cut back space on things people really need to know."

Carroll, whose career as a journalist spans 40 years, joined the L.A. Times in 2000, according to the paper's Web site. Under his leadership, the paper earned five Pulitzer Prizes this year.

Tim Gleason, dean of the SOJC, said Carroll is a "journalist's journalist."

"As an editor he cares deeply about the integrity of the profession and he believes that news, real news is the heart and soul of the business of journalism," Gleason said as he introduced Carroll.

University graduate student Mose Mosely had similar sentiments. He said he admired Carroll not only for his vast experience around the country, but also for his consistent commitment to his ideals.

"The depth of his integrity is very impressive," Mosely said.

Bobbie Willis, a staff writer for the Eugene Weekly, said she felt Carroll brought up some relevant issues in today's media environment.

"It really made me take a look at my career as a journalist," she said.

Willis said she understood Carroll's concerns about the state of journalism nationally, but added that many of the journalists she has encountered were very committed to accurate and ethical reporting.

Carroll had a few words of advise for student journalists; he told them to pick their boss carefully.

"Don't be lured by the money or the big name of the employer," he said, adding that journalists should not allow their integrity to be compromised by unscrupulous employers.

"Don't be a piano player in a whorehouse," he said.

Bush makes bad guys disappear

Above the law
The Bush administration is arguing that it has the right to lock up U.S. citizens forever -- without evidence, witnesses, lawyers or trials. If the Supreme Court agrees, will this still be America?

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By Tim Grieve



April 28, 2004 | U.S. Supreme Court justices listened skeptically last week as Solicitor General Ted Olson argued that foreign detainees being held in U.S. military facilities in Guantánamo Bay have no right to seek relief from U.S. courts. Wednesday, Olson will be back before the court, this time arguing in two historic cases that the government has the authority to lock up U.S. citizens, too -- without charges, without a lawyer, without a trial, without any rights at all -- simply by declaring them "enemy combatants" in the administration's war on terror.

Having government agents sweep U.S. citizens off the streets and into prison cells, holding them incommunicado for as long as the government likes -- it sounds like a dark fantasy of life in a totalitarian state, the kind of thing we're supposed to be fighting against in Iraq. But this is no fantasy. In the cases of Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, the Bush administration is advancing a vision of governmental power that is both far-reaching and unprecedented, at least in the United States of America. And it is a vision -- like the one the administration articulated Tuesday during Supreme Court arguments on the secrecy of Vice President Cheney's energy task force -- that leaves sole discretion, sole authority, and almost unfettered power in the hands of the executive branch.

It's easy to become blasé about liberties lost in the Ashcroft era. The lines between foreign intelligence efforts and criminal investigations have been blurred; the government has more power to snoop, to search, to study your financial transactions and examine your reading habits; foreigners have been detained, immigrants deported. "There are so many things," says Elliot Mincberg, legal director for the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way.

But the administration's arguments in the Padilla and Hamdi cases have activists and analysts on both the left and the right alarmed all over again. Timothy Lynch, director of the conservative Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice, says the Bush administration is advancing a "sweeping theory of executive power" that could lead to "dangerous" legal precedents. "If the administration were to prevail in Hamdi and Padilla, there would be no limit to the number of people who could be arrested here totally outside the normal criminal process, people arrested without arrest warrants, people not going before judges, people being held in solitary confinement in prison facilities right here in the United States," he said.

see the rest at salon

How do you spell 'Paranoid' H-O-M-E-L-A-N-D-S-E-C-U-R-I-T-Y

came across this at work through a link a homepage for a university in Texas. Apparently all Texans must be on the lookout for 'suspicious' stuff like:
-Someone showing unusual interest in utilities, government buildings, historic buildings or similar infrastructure. Pay particular attention to someone photographing, videotaping, inquiring about security, drawing diagrams or making notes about such facilities. If they say they are architecture students don't believe them
-Suspicious or abandoned packages, luggage or mail in a crowded place, such as an airport, office building or shopping center. If you find an unclaimed bag in the middle of Lubbock or some other little cowtown, its probably a bomb left by the A-rabs, not just a bag of dirty laudry someone forgot while loading their car
-A stranger loitering in your neighborhood or a vehicle cruising the streets repeatedly. Are you sure those guys in the black and white car are really cops? Maybe the IDs are fake. They could be terrorists! or worse, students from out of town!
-Someone peering into cars or the windows of a home. Only terrorists, criminals and salesmen are curious to know if anyone is home
-A high volume of traffic going to and coming from a home on a daily basis. Obvious the sign of a drug dealer, terrorist, amway distributer, large family or popular teenager
-Someone loitering around schools, parks or secluded areas. Only terrorists spend time hanging out in the park
-Strange odors coming from a house or building. Tell the Special Agent in Charge of the armed seige that your goulash always smell like that, I'm sure he'll understand
-Open or broken doors and windows at a closed business or an unoccupied residence. How do I know its an unoccupied residence if I don't look in the windows?
-Someone tampering with electrical, gas or sewer systems without an identifiable company vehicle and uniform. Like the FBI agent that is installing your phone tap

Mean people suck, mean cops really suck

For some cops any challenge to their authority, any arguement or attitude, seems to be considered a threat to their safety and therefore an excuse to use force. Admittedly there are bad apples in every profession, but I think the jobs seems to attract a certain type of bully that all too often is given carte blanche to boss people around and hurt them if they don't obey. The cops that did this should not be scolded or reprimanded or disciplined. They should be kicked off the force and arrested for assault and battery.



From the The Oregonian (Portland Ore.)

by Steve Duin

Even blind old ladies terrify the cops
Sunday, April 25, 2004
S he was 71 years old.
She was blind.
She needed her 94-year-old mother to come to her rescue.

And in the middle of the dogfight -- in which Eunice Crowder was pepper-sprayed, Tasered and knocked to the ground by Portland's courageous men in blue -- the poor woman's fake right eye popped out of its socket and was bouncing around in the dirt.

How vicious and ugly can the Portland police get? Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner. This 2003 case is so blatant, the use of force so excessive, the threat of liability so intimidating that the city just approved a $145,000 settlement.

But all those gung-ho fans of the cops can relax. Nothing has changed. Nothing will upset the status quo.

The cops aren't apologizing.

The cops aren't embarrassed.

The cops haven't been disciplined.

And the cops are still insisting, to the bitter end, that they "reasonably believed" this blind ol' bat was a threat to their safety and macho culture.

Eunice Crowder, you see, didn't follow orders. Eunice was uncooperative. Worried a city employee was hauling away a family heirloom, a 90-year-old red toy wagon, she had the nerve to feel her way toward the trailer in which her yard debris was being tossed.

Enter the police. Eunice, who is hard of hearing, ignored the calls of Officers Robert Miller and Eric Zajac to leave the trailer. When she tried, unsuccessfully, to bite the hands that were laid on her, she was knocked to the ground.

When she kicked out at the cops, she was pepper-sprayed in the face with such force that her prosthetic marble eye was dislodged. As she lay on her stomach, she was Tased four times with Zajac's electric stun gun.

And when Nellie Scott, Eunice's 94-year-old mother, tried to rinse out her daughter's eye with water from a two-quart Tupperware bowl, what does Miller do? According to Ernie Warren Jr., Eunice's lawyer, the cop pushed Nellie up against a fence and accused her of planning to use the water as a weapon.

Paranoia runs deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid . . .

Afraid and belligerent. "Cops have changed," Warren said. "When I grew up, they weren't people who huddled together and their only friends were the cops. You had access to them all the time. You weren't afraid of them."

What did Police Chief Derrick Foxworth have to say about the case? "This did not turn out the way we wanted it to turn out," Foxworth said Friday. "Looking back, and I know the officers feel this as well, they may have done something differently. We would have wanted the minimal amount of force to have been used. But I feel we need to recognize Ms. Crowder has some responsibility. She contributed to the situation."

Granted. But Eunice was 71. She was blind. That probably explains why a judge threw out all charges against her and why the city, in a stone-cold panic, settled ASAP.

"This was like fighting Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder," Warren said. "It wasn't a fair fight."

No, but it was another excuse to haul out the usual code words about the cops' "reasonable" belief that they were justified to use a "reasonable amount of force to defend themselves."

If you have a different definition of "reasonable," you just don't understand the Portland police. You need to remember the words of Robert King, head of the police union, defending Officer Jason Sery in the March shooting of James Jahar Perez:

"What sets us apart from people like most of you is that you'll never face a situation in your job where -- in less than 10 seconds -- the routine can turn to truly life-threatening," King wrote. "When that happens to us, when we have to make that ultimate split-second decision, we don't just ask for your understanding, we ask for your support."

She was 71 years old. She was blind. She was lucky, I guess, that these cops -- set apart from people like most of us -- didn't make the usual split-second decision and draw their guns.

A very good point raised

AN open letter to my colleagues in the news business.
By Leonard Pitts
Miami Herald

The silence is getting loud.

It's been nearly four months since the scandal broke. Four months since Jack Kelley, star foreign correspondent for USA Today, was found to have lied his way through his professional life for the last 13 years. He lied about where he had been, what he had seen, whom he had talked to, what they had said. He lied so much I'm only half convinced "Jack Kelley' is his real name.

Yet you, my colleagues, have not asked the most important question:

What does this mean for the future of white journalism?

Granted, you've pontificated about our damaged credibility. You've felled forests with your weighty ruminations about what this portends for the future of our profession. But, evidently cowed by political correctness, you've ignored the most vital issues.

Did USA Today advance a moderately capable journalist because he was white? Did some white editor mentor him out of racial solidarity even though Kelley was unqualified? In light of this fiasco, should we re- examine the de facto affirmative action that gives white men preferential treatment in our newsrooms?

Certainly, no one had to beg for these questions to be asked a year ago, when Jayson Blair got his sorry backside in hot water. Blair, as you hardly need to be reminded, was a black reporter who initially came to the New York Times via a slot in an internship program the paper was using to increase newsroom diversity. It turned out that the only diversity Blair represented was that which is to be found between lies and damned lies.

Still, some observers felt the circumstances of his hiring were almost as important as the reason for his firing. Columnist Andrew Sullivan claimed Blair got away with snookering the Times because his editors feared offending a black journalist.

Columnist Richard Cohen told us Blair enjoyed "favoritism based on race.'

Jennifer Harper, a reporter for the conservative Washington Times, wrote that the Blair episode made the New York paper a "case study on the effects of affirmative action in the newsroom.'

A computer search Friday indicates that Sullivan, Cohen and Harper have thus far been silent on the racial dimensions of the Kelley incident. In fairness to those worthies, I'm sure they're warming up their laptops even as we speak.

While we await the results, let me, in the interest of full disclosure, admit that I didn't think up today's column on my own. Rather, it was inspired by remarks Gwen Ifill of PBS made last week at an awards dinner. Truth to tell, though, she only crystallized what I and, I daresay, many other journalists of color have been thinking ever since Kelley's deceptions were uncovered.

Namely, that this is (with apologies to the Four Tops) the same old song. When a white person screws up, it ignites a debate on the screw up. When a black person screws up, it ignites a debate on race.

So, loathe though I am to position myself as a spokesman, I feel confident in saying one thing on behalf of black journalists everywhere: When and if our industry decides to deal with the issues raised by Kelley's transgressions, we stand ready to help. Need someone to handle outreach to journalism programs at HWCUs (historically white colleges and universities)? Want to discuss whether hiring whites requires us to lower our standards? Looking for ideas of how to make whites feel more welcome?

We're standing by. All you have to do is call.

Because doggone it, white journalism has a long, proud history Edward R. Murrow, Mike Royko ... Matt Drudge. We cannot allow one bad apple to sully that.

So I'll be over here waiting for the discussion of these issues to begin. I'm thinking I should pack a lunch.

-- Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@herald.com

Bush: Privacy of Families Outweighs Photos

Apr 23, 7:59 PM (ET)

By RANDALL CHASE

DOVER, Del. (AP) - President Bush considers the release of photographs of flag-draped military coffins a reminder of the fallen troops' sacrifice, but believes family privacy should be respected, the White House said Friday.

Pentagon officials said the photos, issued last week and posted on an Internet site, should not have been made public under a policy prohibiting media coverage of human remains. Some activists argue that the photos, released last week, underscore the war's human cost.

photo

"America knows full well that our men and women are serving and serving brilliantly both in Iraq and around the world. ... America is aware this is a war against terrorism," Bush spokesman Trent Duffy said. But, he said, "The message is, the sensitivity and privacy of families of the fallen must be the first priority."

The photographs were released to First Amendment activist Russ Kick, who had filed a Freedom of Information Act request.
photo

Kick posted dozens of photographs of American war dead arriving at the nation's largest military mortuary at Dover Air Force Base, prompting the Pentagon on Thursday to bar further release of the photographs to media outlets.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Keck said release of the 361 photos appeared to be in conflict with policy.

"They're not happy with the release of the photos," said Col. Jon Anderson, a spokesman for the Dover base.

Duffy said he did not know whether Bush had personally weighed in on the Pentagon's move to overturn the base's decision, or whether Bush considered the released photos an affront to the families.

The photos were taken at the Dover base, and most were of flag-draped cases used by the military to transport remains. But Anderson said Friday that the photos also included images of the remains of the shuttle Columbia astronauts arriving at Dover, as well as casualties from Afghanistan. A NASA spokesman said that at least 18 rows of photos on the site were of the Columbia astronauts.
photo
According to his Web site, Kick, who has not returned phone calls or e-mails from The Associated Press, requested all Dover photos from Feb. 1, 2003, to the present. "He wasn't distinguishing between what he wanted," Anderson said. "He just wanted everything."

At least one of the Columbia photos, a Feb. 5 shot of a flag-draped coffin, was included in a picture of the Web site distributed by the AP.

At a rally in Dover last month, war protesters criticized Bush for continuing the practice of previous administrations of not allowing the public or media to witness the arrival of remains at the base.

"We need to stop hiding the deaths of our young; we need to be open about their deaths," said Jane Bright of West Hills, Calif., whose 24-year-old son, Evan Ashcraft, was killed in combat in July.

On NBC's "Today" on Friday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina agreed with the policy banning photos from Dover because "there's no ceremony held; it's a caretaking event."

But Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington, who served in the Navy during the Vietnam War, said photos of caskets coming home from Vietnam had a tremendous impact on the way Americans came to view that war.

"As people began to see the reality of it and see the 55,000 people who were killed coming back in body bags, they became more and more upset by the war," he said. "This is not about privacy. This is about trying to keep the country from facing the reality of war."

The Pentagon move came a day after a military contractor fired a cargo worker because her photograph of flag-draped remains was published on the front page of Sunday editions of The Seattle Times.

---

On the Net:

Kick's Web site: http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/coffin(underscore)photos/dover

Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home

there must be something in the water over there


3 U.N. police die in Kosovo jail shootout


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By Nebojsa Markovic



April 17, 2004 | KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) -- A Jordanian policeman opened fire on a group of international U.N. police in Kosovo on Saturday, killing two Americans before he was killed when officers returned fire. Ten American officers and an Austrian were wounded.

The shootout erupted when a group correctional officers -- 21 Americans, two Turks and an Austrian -- were leaving the detention center after a day of training. They came under fire from at least one of a group of Jordanians on guard at the prison, said Neeraj Singh, a U.N. spokesman.

The officers shot back in a gunbattle that lasted about 10 minutes. It was not immediately clear what prompted the Jordanian to shoot.

"As far as we know, there was no communication between the officer who fired and the group of victims," Singh said, adding that investigators looking into the incident were questioning four Jordanian officers.

The Jordanian government expressed regret for the incident in a statement and said it also was investigating the shooting, Jordan's official Petra agency reported. The statement identified the Jordanian officer as Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali.

U.N. and local police officers sealed off the yard of the detention center, took pictures and marked the bullet cartridges with numbers. The body of a police officer, covered with what looked like a dark blue jacket, lay for hours in the yard of the prison compound.

One witness, a 50-year-old woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she heard the shooting, ran to her balcony overlooking the prison yard and saw one officer shooting and another hiding.

Another witness who also gave only his age, 31, said he was at a nearby park when he heard the shooting and later heard American officers yelling, "Drop the gun! Drop the gun!"

"It is absolutely too early to draw any conclusions with regard to what happened there," the head of the U.N. police, Stefan Feller, told Associated Press Television News after visiting the site. He called the shootout a "terrible incident."

Milan Ivanovic, a doctor at the hospital in Kosovska Mitrovica, told AP that five American officers and one Austrian officer were being treated. It was not immediately clear where the other wounded were being treated, or what their nationalities were.

"Their wounds are predominantly in the chest and abdomen," Ivanovic said. "They were caused by firearms and possibly explosive devices."

Kosovska Mitrovica has long been the scene of violence between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, including riots that broke out a month ago, killing 19 and injuring 900.

Ethnic Albanians live on the southern side of the Ibar River in the divided city, and Serbs live in the north. Kosovska Mitrovica is located 25 miles from the provincial capital, Pristina.

Kosovo became a U.N. protectorate in 1999, after NATO launched a 78-day air war to stop Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic from cracking down on ethnic Albanians seeking independence.

There are some 3,500 U.N. police officers serving in Kosovo alongside a 6,000-strong local force.

The top U.N. official in Kosovo, Harri Holkeri, seemed stunned at the shooting incident, which came as the mission is still grappling with last month's violence.

"I am deeply shocked and dismayed at the unfortunate death of dedicated professionals who have come such a great distance to help Kosovo on its road to future," he said.

An unsanitized report from the front lines of Fallujah

can be found here

"Cause something is happening and you don't know what it is....."
Is this a new way for Bob to meet chicks? Was the endless tour not attracting enough nubile groupies? Not that he isn't looking great, but what the sweet and fancy Jesus is Bob doing in an underwear ad? It can't be the money, he hardly needs the exposure-to paraphrase Spike Lee, "Its gotta be the panties"
Picture it: You are Bob Dylan. You've been there, done that, there aren't many peaks left to scale. You're 60 years old and the phone rings and someone says, "Say Bob, if you aren't busy next week, how would you like to hang out in Venice with a bunch of underwear models? We'll spring for the Dom Perignon and cocaine, just bring your cowboy hat and trim your mustache before you come. Oh, and we'll pay you a minimum of six figures and sell some records for you." Who would say no?



Tangled Up in Boobs
What's Bob Dylan doing in a Victoria's Secret ad?
By Seth Stevenson/Slate
Posted Monday, April 12, 2004, at 9:39 AM PT

The spot: A well-formed young woman cavorts through a palazzo, wearing nothing but heels, lingerie, and a pair of outsized, feathery wings. At intervals, we cut to a shot of some sort of death's-head demon, who looks poised to bite into the pretty youth's skull, perhaps to suck on the marrow of her soul and prolong his undead half-life. Wait … stand by … I'm now being told that this creature is in fact Bob Dylan. (Click here to see the ad.)When Bob Dylan shows up in a Victoria's Secret commercial, it immediately triggers three questions. The first is: Am I hallucinating? Seriously, I think I'm hallucinating—can you see Bob Dylan, and did you eat the same shrimp I ate? The second is: Why on earth would Bob Dylan do this? And the third, and perhaps most puzzling, is: Why on earth would Victoria's Secret do this?

Moving past the first line of inquiry, which likely won't get us very far, let's ask ourselves why Bob Dylan, respected countercultural artist, would choose to sell panties. I think there are a few possible motives. The first is, of course, money. This seemed to be the sole motive when, several years ago, Dylan sold the Bank of Montreal the right to use "The Times They Are a-Changin'" in an ad. But the Vicky's Secret sellout feels different, in part because Dylan actually appears in the commercial.

Which brings me to the second possible motive: pure whimsy. He may just think it's funny to be in an underwear ad and that flying to Venice to leer at models could make for a diverting weekend. (I also wouldn't totally discount the idea that he's playing a sly, decades-in-the-making practical joke. Newspaper reports have noted that in 1965, when asked what might tempt him to sell out, Dylan said, "Ladies undergarments.")

But I think the most likely motive for Dylan is exposure. It's a real struggle for older rockers to remind the world that they still exist. Their music's not played on the radio, and their videos (if they even make them) aren't in heavy rotation on VH1. Thus you see the Jaguar ads with Sting, or the MCI ads with James Taylor and Michael McDonald—all of them prominently featuring the artist's song. It's essentially a way to put a video on the major networks, where an older audience might see it. Yes, in exchange for publicizing their art they sacrifice some integrity, but this is basically an understandable tradeoff. And Dylan even gets, in the terms of his deal, a mix CD of his songs sold at Victoria's Secret stores.

So, it makes some sense for Bob. But what about Vicky? Why would a brand that's about sexiness, youth, and glamour want any connection at all with a decrepit, sixtysomething folksinger? The answer, my friend, is totally unclear. The answer is totally unclear.

Even if Victoria's Secret hopes to bring in more boomer women, do those women want their underwear to exude the spirit and essence of Bob Dylan? Or, conversely, is Bob Dylan the sort of man they're hoping to attract? Even if you're of the belief that men frequently shop at VS for their ladies, I still don't see the appeal of this ad. I, for instance, am a man, and I can assure you that Bob Dylan is not what I'm looking for in a woman's undergarment. (And if I found him there—man, would that be disturbing.)

Victoria's Secret wouldn't return my calls, but media reports say the idea of putting Dylan's face in the ad (they'd been using his song—"Love Sick"—in ads for the past year or so) came straight from corporate chief Les Wexner. To the company's surprise, Dylan accepted their offer. It's at this point that someone at Victoria's Secret should have stopped the madness. Just because you can hire Bob Dylan as the figurehead for your lingerie line, doesn't mean you should. Perhaps no one was willing to say no to the big boss, or perhaps they fully expected Dylan to say no. Joke's on them.

'Bad Business' a good read

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer


Bad Business
By Robert B. Parker
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 320 pp, 24.95 dollars


Readers still don't know his first name, but after 29 books we know just about everything else we need to know about Robert B. Parker's private eye hero Spenser.

The latest installment in the Spenser saga, Bad Business, sees the Boston sleuth take on wife-swapping corporate scammers. He is aided, as usual, by his psychologist soul mate Susan Silverman; Hawk, the world's most honorable thug; and the usual cast of trustworthy cops, charming criminal defense lawyers and friendly hit men.

Approached by the annoying Marlene Rowley to get the goods on her cheating executive husband Trent, Spenser keeps tripping over other private eyes tailing everyone connected to the Rowleys and Trent's energy trading firm, Kinergy. When Trent is murdered at his desk, Spenser suspects more than infidelity is involved.

While Parker is very good at painting detailed portraits of even the most minor characters, they tend to be strictly friends or enemies. Those who are Spenser's friends are willing to do almost anything for him and rarely have anything but the most minor of character flaws or weaknesses. The criminal careers of Hawk and hit man Vinnie Morris seem like minor eccentricities, while the vulgar yuppies central to the case seem like the worst people in the world every time they open their mouths.

The humor of Spenser's smart-aleck streak and his banter with Hawk have always helped put the series a cut above the average hard-boiled detective hero, and Parker manages enough levity to keep the story entertaining.

Sadly, after a long run of Spenser books, Parker seems to be doing a lot of this by rote. We have the stock scenes of Spenser with Susan, Spenser being romantic yet manly and Susan drinking her glass of wine a milliliter at a time while delivering a detailed psychological analysis of all the players in the case, including Spenser. After using such set pieces in almost every Spenser novel, they begin to have the ring of formula.

Despite this, Parker continues to demonstrate his gift for creating crackling dialog and believable characters. He captures the archetype of the corporate good-ol'-boy in Kinergy CEO Bob Cooper and the radio talk show host and "corporate pimp" Darrin O'Mara is superbly smarmy and fluent in psychobabble.

While action takes a back seat to investigation this time around, Bad Business is still among the better installments in the series

Hey Jesus, you got some 'splaining to do!
So the whole world is at war with Al-Quaida because they are violent religious fanatics, isn't there something in the bible about letting "he who is without sin cast the first stone?"

Murder suspect plucks out own eye in jail

April 6, 2004 | SHERMAN, Texas (AP) -- A jailed man accused of killing and cutting out the hearts of his son, estranged wife and her daughter plucked out his own eye and then quoted from the Bible, officials said Tuesday.
Andre L. Thomas was in a county jail cell Friday night when he tore his eye out of its socket with his hands, said Grayson County Sheriff Keith Gary.
Thomas, 21, then quoted the verse Mark 9:47: "And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell."
Thomas was taken to a hospital and the eyeball was put on ice, but it could not be reattached. He is now being held in restraints at the jail, the sheriff said.
Thomas is accused in the March 26 stabbing deaths of his 4-year-old son, his 20-year-old estranged wife and her 1-year-old daughter. All the victims' hearts were cut out; two were found at Andre Thomas' house. He turned himself in and was charged with one count of capital murder.
A judge ruled Monday that Thomas will be evaluated by a mental health professional.



Mother who stoned sons to death acquitted
Jury determines she didn't know right from wrong

Updated: 10:45 p.m. ET April 03, 2004TYLER, Texas - A woman who claimed God ordered her to bash in the heads of her sons was acquitted of all charges by reason of insanity Saturday after a jury determined she did not know right from wrong during the killings.

A jury found that Deanna Laney was legally insane May 9 when she killed her two older sons, ages 6 and 8, in the front yard and left the youngest, now 2, maimed in his crib.

Laney, 39, would have received an automatic life sentence had she been convicted of capital murder.

Laney broke into tears as the verdict was read. Her husband, Keith Laney, sat solemnly with his head down. A few jurors cried and struggled to maintain their composure.

State law allows Laney to be committed to a maximum security state hospital. Medical evaluations will dictate when she will be released. She will remain at the Smith County Jail until a hearing regarding her transfer.

Defense attorney Tonda Curry said the verdict doesn’t mean Laney escaped punishment.

“Now and for the rest of her life, the punishment and torment that’s going on in her own head is more significant and more damaging to her than anything the criminal justice system could have done, other than death,” Curry said.

All five mental health experts consulted in the case, including two for the prosecution and one for the judge, concluded that a severe mental illness caused Laney to have psychotic delusions that rendered her incapable of knowing right from wrong during the killings — the standard in Texas for insanity.

Smith County District Attorney Matt Bingham said had no regrets about taking the case to trial.

“This is a case that the citizens of this county needed to make the decision on,” he said.

Jurors deliberated about seven hours before reaching their verdict in the deaths of 8-year-old Joshua and 6-year-old Luke, and the beating of Aaron.

Defense attorneys argued that insanity was the only reason why a deeply religious mother who homeschooled her children would kill two of them and maim another without so much as a tear.

“There was no crying,” Curry said. “She was insane. There is no other answer.”

Psychiatrists testified that Laney believed she was divinely chosen by God — just as Mary was chosen to bear Christ — to kill her children as a test of faith and then serve as a witness after the world ended. In a videotape played at her trial, Laney said she saw her youngest son play with a spear, hold a rock and squeeze a frog, and took them all as signs from God that she should kill her children.

In closing arguments earlier Saturday, prosecutors portrayed the killings last Mother’s Day weekend as deceptively planned and coldly executed.

“It was graphic, it was horrific and it was brutal,” Bingham told the jury.

Bingham pounded his fist in his hand as he recounted Joshua’s killing: “He got strike after strike after strike on his head to the point that his brains were coming out of his head like liquid.”

Prosecutors said that even if Laney believed she was doing right by God, she had to have known she was doing wrong by state law. Her first call, they pointed out, was to 911 to summon authorities.

The 911 tape was among the evidence jurors reviewed during deliberations. They also went over psychiatric testimony to resolve a disagreement over why Deanna Laney stopped beating Aaron, then 14 months old.

Psychiatrists testified that Laney couldn’t finish killing the baby, and that she told God, “You’re just going to have to do the rest.” Prosecutors said that action indicated Laney knew right from wrong and that if she chose to disobey God’s orders by not killing Aaron, she could have disobeyed his orders to kill the other two.

Bingham said Aaron, who lives with his father, suffered permanent injuries in the attack.

As if we needed further proof that the universe has a sense of humour


Brawl breaks out at anger management assembly
WOODLAWN, Maryland (AP) -- A brawl broke out during an anger management assembly at a suburban high school.

Two people were arrested and 11 students were suspended after a shoving match escalated into a melee during Thursday's assembly.

Authorities said a confrontation between a student's mother and a group of girls who had been bothering her daughter turned into a shouting match, and led to pushing and hitting, before the crowd of 750 students erupted into "chaos," said C. Anthony Thompson, principal of Woodlawn High School.

The melee began as students on stage acted out peaceful ways to resolve conflict during the assembly was organized by Sheppard Pratt Health System.

Muscleman governor about to have ass put in sling

A story from the Guardian about the man Doonesbury calls the "Gropenfurher"

"In Ms Richardson's original interview with The Sun about the alleged groping incident, she said: "He kept saying how fantastic I looked and staring at my boobs. When I went to shake his hand he pulled me on to his knee, saying, 'I really want to know if your breasts are real'. I told him they are an F-cup. Before I knew what was happening he circled my nipple with his finger and gave it a squeeze. He then said, 'Yeah, they are real.' I stood up and said, 'You're making me nervous'. He told me not to be nervous and pulled me back on his knee. I said, 'Can I go, please?' He said, 'Yeah', and patted my bum as I went off."

Ah yes, a class act that Arnie.

:: Thursday, April 01, 2004 ::

30th Robert Johnson recording found

SAN ANTONIO, Texas, NOTA Press Agency (April 1)?In what blues scholars and record collectors are hailing as the fmd of the century, a female San Antonian construction worker has announced that she has found a hitherto unknown Robert Johnson master labelled "Fool For You."

Johnson, regarded as the most influetial Delta bluesman in history, died in 1938, aged 27, leaving behind a slim legacy of 29 recordings. Leastwise, that is what has always been believed until ThursdaY's shock announcement.

Abril Inocente, 33, said she came across a metal cannister in a building being demolished next to the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, in which Johnson had his first recording session, during which he recorded 16 of what would become some of the most influential recordings in history.

Johnson was born in Hazelhurst, Miss., on May 8,1911. In performance, Johnson played his own songs as well as those of other bluesmen and generally popular music by performers such as Bing Crosby. When he made up his mind to record, in 1936, he approached H. C. Speirs, a white record store owner in Jackson, Miss.

Speirs sent Johnson to Ernie Oertle, an American Record Company scout. Oertle and Johnson went to San Antonio on Nov. 23, 1936.

On Monday, Nov. 23, Johnson recorded eight songs: "Kindhearted Woman Blues," "I Believe I'll dust My Broom," "Sweet Home Chicago," "Ramblin'on My Mind," "When You Got a Good Friend," "Come on in My Kitchen," "Terraplane Blues," and "Phonograph Blues." Also recording in the makeshift studio that day were Hermanas Barraza and a western vocal group called The Chuck Wagon Gang.

Later that night, Johnson apparently ran into trouble somewhere in downtown San Antonio. No one knows what happened, but as the story goes, Law had to bail him out of jail during his stay in San Antonio, and it may have been that Wednesday.

On the following day, Thanksgiving, Johnson returned to the studio, but for some unknown reason recorded only one song: "32:20 Blues." His voice sounds tired on the recording, perhaps because of little sleep he had gotten behind the bars of the Bexar County cooler.

He returned on Friday morning, apparently refreshed, and recorded "They're Red Hot," "Dead Shrimp Blues," "Cross Road Blues," "Walkin' Blues," "Last Fair Deal Gone Down," "Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)," and "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day."

Johnson returned to recording in Jume of 1937, this time in Dallas. He did two takes each of "Hellhound On My Trail," "Little Queen of Spades," "Malted Milk," "Drunken Hearted Man," "Me and the Devil Blues," "Stop Breakin' Down Blues," 'Y raveling Riverside Blues," and "Honeymoon Blues," and three takes of "Milkcow's Calf Blues," and four takes of "Love in Vain."

For years, these have been believed to be Johnson's total volume of recodings, altough rumours of a missing Johnson master have circulated for years, but music historians have dismissed them as wishful thinking.

"This certainkly changes our view of that," musicologist Tother Lomax said.

"I didn't know what it was at first," Inocente said. "But after I brushed the dust of the metal cannister, I saw a handwritten label saying: R. Johnson 'Fool for You'."

"Opening it up, I saw what looked like a large wheel of black cheese with mold on it," Inocente added.

Recordings of the era were recorded on large wax masters, that fit the description given, according to Parlaphone Record sound engineer Mizzen Shellac.

Johnson died after being poisoned by a jealous husband at a juke joint on Aug. 13, 1938, in Three Forks, just outside Greemwood, Miss., at which the bluesman had been playing.

Would you both shut up and think?

Book review from The Daily Yomiuri, 

Kevin Wood Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Dude, Where's My Country?
By Michael Moore
Warner Books, 249 pp, 24.95 dollars

===

Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America
By Laura Ingraham
Regnery Publishing, 342 pp, 27.95 dollars


Liberal satirist and documentarian Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? and conservative talk radio attack blonde Laura Ingraham's Shut Up & Sing are the literary equivalent of the sort of smug, self-satisfied invective and creative misinterpretation of the facts one would be disappointed to hear in a "did not!--did too!" argument between 7-year-olds. Taken together they are a one-two punch that make the reader long for the gentlemanly rhetoric and Wildean wit of pro wrestlers' pre-bout trash talk.

Ingraham graduated from the Ivy League bastion of Dartmouth, worked as a speechwriter in the final years of the administration of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and as law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, became a defense attorney for white-collar criminals and finally a political commentator for NBC. She currently hosts a popular syndicated radio talk show in the United States.

Michael Moore, a college dropout, magazine editor, writer and activist, made his first film,"Roger and Me" (1989) about his unsuccessful efforts to confront General Motors Chairman Roger Smith. In terms of objective journalism, it was one-sided, shallow, manipulative and unfair. As a satirical documentary, it was brilliantly funny, razor sharp and original. It won numerous awards and its rags-to-riches success story (Moore maxed out numerous credit cards and even organized bingo games to raise the money needed to make the film) made the director a progressive populist hero to many and launched his career as a professional gadfly.

"Roger and Me" and the recent Oscar-winner "Bowling for Columbine" are Moore at his funniest--shining his klieg lights on absurdity and hypocrisy in U.S. society by playing the bewildered everyman and bushwhacking corporate sleazeballs, gun nuts and assorted conservative ne'er-do-wells.

Dude is Moore preaching to the choir. He lists all the faults, real and imagined, of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush in an outraged rush. Unsurprisingly, Moore does not like or trust Bush, and considers him a lying weasel and corporate shill. Moore goes on to illustrate why he thinks this by quoting Bush and his inner circle and pointing to his well-known connections to the oil industry. Its all meticulously footnoted, but there is nothing new or especially interesting here, just Moore working himself into a frenzy of righteous indignation.

Humor, normally Moore's strong suit, gets short shrift, though his chapter on "How to Talk to Your Conservative Brother-in-Law" has a few good laughs and some sensible arguments and suggestions for helping convert orthodox Republicans back to the middle of the road. More strained however are his rhetorical questions for "George of Arabia" and his hinting at some sort of dark conspiracy between the Bush and bin Laden families.

Moore would be better advised to stick to comedy and leave the journalistic heavy lifting to guys like Greg Palast (The Best Democracy Money Can Buy), who are better equipped to handle it.

He makes a number of factual errors regarding the departure of bin Laden family members from the United States following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. aid to the Taliban, and the long since debunked myth about Wesley Clark being asked by the White House to use his position as a commentator on CNN to connect former Iraqi President Saddam Hussien to the 9/11 attacks.

While Moore is no poet and might make a better comedian than a journalist, Laura Ingraham makes him look like Edward R. Murrow, H. L. Mencken and Shakespeare rolled into one. Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics and the UN Are Subverting America is not a book, but 339 pages of incoherent paranoid ranting between hard covers.

Like most of her U.S. talk radio siblings, Ingraham is outraged about just about everything. In this instance she is writing to warn us all of a terrifying threat to the United States: celebrities. Ingraham says that the elites that make up the entertainment industry, the "ivory tower" of academe, the business world, the media, politics and international organization are poised to destroy the United States. Aiding them are miscellaneous elites including, but not limited to: "trial lawyers, multiculturalists, God-haters, and the race-relations mafia," college-educated professionals, feminists, city dwellers--essentially everyone but the banjo-playing inbred hillbilly kid in Deliverance. It's surprising she leaves the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission and the Elders of Zion off the list.

"Elites are defined not so much by class or wealth or position as they are by a general outlook. Their core belief--embraced with a fervor that does not allow for rational debate--is that they are superior to We the People. They know better."

So does Ingraham. She tells us exactly how all elites think: "They hate America" and "They think we're stupid."

Ingraham takes Bush's "You're either with us or with the terrorists" rhetorical excess a step further--you are either with her or you probably have fangs, three eyes and eat babies

As opposed to Moore's relatively careful footnoting, Ingraham rarely backs up her claims with any sort of evidence or logic, instead engaging in obvious sophistry: For example, she claims H.G. Wells believed patriotism and religious belief caused war and was a "burning" anti-Semite and cites a passage from George Bernard Shaw that appears to favor scientific extermination of "the sort of people who do not fit in," and then goes on to try to tar all liberal intellectuals with the same brush.

Particular venom is reserved for entertainers who dare to comment on politics, especially Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and Barbara Striesand--who should "shut up and sing." Most of a chapter is taken up attacking Michael Moore for making money and being fat. Moore may occasionally try to make two and two add up to five, but Ingraham seems more inclined to insist two is a million and that anyone who adds two and two and gets four is an "elite" who thinks they are smarter than everyone else.

A similar mixture of false logic, specious argument and misinformation that would make Joseph Goebbels turn green with envy is used to attack anyone opposing the mixing of church and state as being on a crusade against religion, and to prove that "Antiwar rallies are really hate rallies. Hate-America rallies, that is." Ingraham attacks the United Nations for trying to "control America" and opposing capital punishment; nongovernmental organizations for being "undemocratic"; Europe and especially France for disliking Bush.

It seems like Ingraham made a bet with fellow conservative pin-up and talk show rottweiller Ann Coulter (Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism) to see who could make the most outrageous claims and still get into print. So far it's a close race.

Dude may not be Moore's best effort, but its main sin is not being funny enough. Ingraham's poisonous diatribe makes it look like Pulitzer material. Shut Up & Sing is the kind of book critics read so that you won't have to.





Copyright 2004 The Yomiuri Shimbun

And you thought your high school was run by Nazis...

"Sideways ballcap lands youth in jail"

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0313marlon13.html

A nice article on whisky tasting can be found at Slate today

Too much chatter means too little thought, Oe says

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

While Japanese cultural exports in the form of pop music, manga and anime may be gaining ground abroad, novelist and Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe says Japan's cultural power is waning as true critical thought drowns in a sea of polite conversation.

Oe argued in a March 5 speech in English at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Yurakucho, Tokyo, that the relentless growth in the publication of interviews, panel discussions and collections of speeches threatens to supplant written intellectual discourse and is leading to the cultural impoverishment of Japan.

A prolific novelist and noted activist, Oe won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994 and is widely considered to be one of the leading intellectual figures in the nation.

In his speech, Oe referred to the work of U.S. scholars Edward Said and Masao Miyoshi in the early 1990s, when the two theorized that while bubble-era Japan was a dominant economic power, the nation's contemporary verbal culture was "austere, even impoverished, dominated by talk shows, comic books and relentless conferences and panel discussions."

Oe commented that while Japan's economic fortunes had since ebbed, Said and Miyoshi's comments on the state of the nation's culture were an accurate reflection on the present situation. He added that the current recession is casting a further shadow as companies cut back spending on cultural activities.

Japan, more than other nations, faces a crisis of written culture due to the relentless publication of ideas presented in a conversational mode. This conversational style of communication, which seeks compromise, conformity and consensus, is replacing real intellectual critical discourse, Oe said. He pointed out that there are no longer any national magazines catering to an intellectual audience, and that the remaining outlet for criticism--the newspaper book review--has become shorter and seems to include less and less analysis of theme, methodology and style.

"Japanese writing style has been undergoing a radical change lately, and whether the change is a cause or an effect, conversationalism is the dominant mode," Oe said. Where once writers felt the need to back up their assertions with facts and logical argument, he said, conversational writing assumes certain level of persuasive consensus. When confronted with disagreement in a conversation, one can apologize or ignore it, said Oe.

The superficiality and celebrity culture engendered by this conversationalism in publishing is beginning to infect other areas of culture and even politics, Oe contended, citing the "frantic support" enjoyed by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi when he first took office on the basis of structural reform slogans that offered little substance.

The result of the "washing away" of Japan's intellectuals by this flood of conversation is that Japanese no longer give serious thought to how the world should be or to the creation of ideas. The kind of serious discourse that dominated Japanese intellectual life in the immediate postwar period has disappeared, Oe said, and it may never return.

Japan today is dependent on the West for cultural input, soaking up Western culture, but exerting little influence in return, he said. Japanese pop culture may be a leading export commodity, but Pokemon and Hikaru Utada are unlikely to change the way people around the world think, in the way Oe said critics such as Said and Noam Chomsky have.

Oe said the nation must nurture an intellectual leadership and an audience that will not circumvent the logicality of written discourse, if the current situation is to be rectified.





Copyright 2004 The Yomiuri Shimbun

In your ear - Norah Jones, Brad Mehldau Trio

IN YOUR EAR


Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer


Norah Jones
Feels Like Home
Toshiba EMI, 2,427 yen


How do you follow up a debut album that wins eight Grammy awards and sells 5.1 million copies? Do you try to catch lightning in a bottle a second time or move in a different direction to avoid comparisons with the previous platinum standard?

With her sophomore effort, Feels Like Home, Norah Jones has done a bit of both.

All the things that made Come Away With Me a massive hit are here: The same simple, sparse, mid-tempo arrangements, warm jazz-inflected vocals, and relaxed, romantic atmosphere inform every track. While her debut album leaned heavily toward light jazz while giving a nod to folk and country with songs like "Lonestar" and Hank Williams' "Cold Cold Heart," Feels Like Home plants a foot firmly in the country while still demonstrating jazzy roots.

It's debatable whether an album that includes guest appearances by Dolly Parton and The Band's Levon Helm and Garth Hudson can really be called jazz, but what else can you call a cover of Duke Ellington's "Melancholia" (with lyrics added by Jones to become the 2 a.m. heartache torch song "Don't Miss You At All")?

If we reject such artificial pigeonholing in favor of Louis Armstrong's maxim that there are only two kinds of music: good and bad, Feels Like Home must unequivocally be considered good.

Top-notch guitar work by Adam Levy and Kevin Breit give a rootsy feel to tunes like "Toes" and "In the Morning," with Jones' piano spotlighted on "Carnival Town." Jones and her bandmates have clearly grown more confident as songwriters--of the 14 tracks on the album she had a hand in five and six were written by members of her band. Their compositions hold their own against the aforementioned Ellington adaptation, a catchy cover of Tom Waits' "The Long Way Home," and a country-blues version of Townes Van Zandt's "Be Here To Love Me."

This is truly adult contemporary music--not the tuneless schlock usually associated with the term. It has none of the tawdry, tacky, MTV-driven, image-making fluff and in-your-face attitude normally associated with the latest in pop music. It is tasteful, timeless, modern and mature music by and for grown-ups.

Brad Mehldau Trio
Anything Goes
Warner Music Japan, 2,520 yen


Anything Goes, a collection of straight-ahead instrumental jazz covers by the Brad Mehldau Trio--pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy--offers few surprises and breaks little new ground, but delivers 10 tracks of virtuoso playing by a trio so tightly coordinated they must be reading each others minds.

Mehldau is an outstanding technical player with a fast, fluid Charlie Parker-like ability to play twice as many notes as anyone else while never sounding busy.

The songs are mostly standards like the Cole Porter title track with a few curveballs --Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place" and a wonderfully nostalgic version of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years"--thrown in for variety.

Slower ballads such as Hoagy Carmichael's "The Nearness of You" counterbalance the barely contained exuberance of Thelonius Monk's "Skippy." The angular, outside, bop arrangement of Harold Arlen's "Get Happy" still manages to swing and the Charlie Chaplin chestnut "Smile" is rescued from sentimentality with Grenadier taking the melody line on bass while Mehldau holds down the bottom end with his left hand

Musical ideology
Here's an interesting and thoughtful article from jazz pianist Brad Mehldau on jazz politics and ways of looking at music. See this space in a few days (or the Daily Yomiuri on Thursday) for my review of his latest album.


from Jazz Times Magazine December 2003

Ideology, Burgers and Beer

When I was first living in New York in 1989, a bunch of us musicians used to head over to the Corner Bistro in the West Village after the gig around 2:00 AM for their character-building half-pound burger and draft beer, accompanied to music from one of the best jazz jukeboxes in Manhattan. I think it was the drummer Joe Farnsworth who thought up a ridiculous but irresistible kind of word game that we often played there. The idea was to think of pairs of jazz musicians throughout history with the same first name or last name, pit them against each other, and then pick the greater.

Around the table we would go, taking turns as one person would formulate a pair, and then the rest of us would choose our favorite. Examples would be: Elvin Jones or Joe Jones? Wynton Kelly or Wynton Marsalis? Paul Chambers or Paul Gonsalves? (There was one night when this doubled as a drinking game. The rest of the table had to go bottoms up if someone could think up an adjacent last-name/first name two-gender pair —Shirley Scott or Scott Henderson?) As the night wore on and the dollar-drafts kept flowing, the game usually degenerated into random pairings that spread out into all realms of culture — Greg Brady or Greg Osby? Lonnie Plexico or Lonnie Anderson? Keith Jarrett or Keith Moon? Then it became a typical Gen-X affair, and we got a kick out of yoking the jazz musicians and pop-culture figures together as an end in itself.

The game had a certain purity precisely because of its inanity. How could you choose one person over another in an arbitrary pair like that? It was impossible! Joe was always there to remind us, though, of the simple conditions of the game: “You have to choose one.” Another rule that was almost always enforced: After you make your choice, own it with no apologies or explanations. Likewise, no one else was allowed to comment on your pick any more than a monosyllabic groan or grunt. It was onto the next person immediately. The effect was sublimely ridiculous – a rapid-fire barrage of written-in-stone value judgments against the absurd backdrop of matching first and last names.

The subtext of the game was that making comparative value judgments always smacks a little of the absurd. “Player X is more important in jazz history than Player Y,” is a ‘substantive’ statement, following legal and political commentator Stanley Fish’s gloss on that word. This kind of statement implies that further debate is redundant and worthless, although, alas, not everyone will grasp that implication. A real-world analogous statement is, “Every unborn child should have the right to life.” Fish’s point is that you don’t waste your time trying to argue against this kind of belief or reach a consensus with the person voicing it. If you disagree, your best tactic is to put your own view forward just as unapologetically, and lobby even stronger for its application.

How analogous are political and aesthetic substantive claims? In our game, we were poking fun at the overblown seriousness that surrounds aesthetic judgments. We were being contemptuous of the political tone of these ‘who’s the greatest in the history of jazz’ discussions. Why all the gravity? You’d get someone proclaiming that Wes was the end-all on guitar, everything after him was shite, and these new players today were desecrating the legacy of jazz guitar. It wasn’t so much the statement itself; it was the tone —all the tragic resignation of a Trotskyite who saw his original dream go up in smoke. I mean, we’re not talking serious world affairs that will affect humanity here. It’s just music! Right?

On one particular night, though, we fell into one of those dead-end ‘who’s better’ discussions. Lapsing into grave, weighty tones, we became the butt of our own joke. The pair in question was Sonny Rollins/Sonny Stitt. It was a perfect specimen of the game - apples and oranges, completely useless and ridiculous to pick one over the other. Regardless, the majority of the group went with Rollins, but a few chose Stitt. This was one of the few instances where we broke our no-explanations rule. A long, protracted discussion followed over just what the criterion for everyone’s choice was. My camp maintained that Rollins beat out Stitt. Undoubtedly, he’s one of the greatest improvisers that jazz has ever had. His winning greatness for us, though, was his double attribute: Not only are his improvisations so inspired, but Rollins’ solos often have a compositional logic that compels you to listen in a different manner. He pioneered that approach on the classic ‘Blue Seven’ from ‘Saxophone Colosssus’. There’s an organic way in which the motifs generate themselves out of each other. His opening melody drifts seamlessly into the solo; it’s all one large idea. Rollins wasn’t just blowing an inspired improvisation. He was building an edifice, erecting something that would stay standing through time because of the internal logic holding it together. To cement our argument in favor of Rollins, we dropped the big ‘P’ word: Profound.

The other guys maintained that Stitt was the greater because he was just a player — pure, unadorned great bop. As the discussion went on, it turned out that the whole ‘compositional’ approach, represented by a host of icons including Monk himself, lacked greatness for these guys. My camp was outraged, seething. What the heck did they mean? We had a strange feeling of disorientation, like on a Twilight Zone episode — were they the same musicians we had just been gigging with? Who were they, if they couldn’t get with Monk? Or maybe they were just trying to be provocative.

We quit the name game at that point and got all serious. The binary here was ‘more compositional player’ vs. ‘just a blower’. Example: Monk vs. Bud? Their answer unflinchingly: “Bud.” Note that the word ‘just’ was not pejorative for them. On the contrary, to be just a blower, albeit on an inspired level, was what jazz was all about.

Bird personified that. Those solos on live records like ‘Bird With The Herd’, when he sat in with the Woody Herman Band, or a record like ‘One Night in Washington’, are dangerously, menacingly good. ‘Just blowing’ was what made jazz more punk than any punk rock band could ever be. To be able to blow a solo like Bird — profound, gripping, full of urgency and beautiful mortality — but to do so, like him, with the casual ease of someone standing at a bus stop — well, now that was something that might be called ‘great’.

That ease couldn’t be hindered by compositional elements, because ‘composition’, was, in their line of argument, anathema to jazz. It was everything that Bird was escaping from; it was what made his music so free and joyous. A Bird head like ‘Anthropology’ was something that came more out of his improvisations. It was pasted together almost as an afterthought from the most inspired bits of his solos.

Building too much compositional logic into your solo was a flaw for the Stitt camp — an affectation that got in the way of the flow. It implied pretentiousness and an overly apparent intellectualism that wore thin and didn’t stand the test of repeated listening. Bop was Mecca for the Stitt camp, and Bird was the prophet. Their favorites followed in his footsteps through the hard-bop era: noble, unaffected players who were usually more obscure, like Tina Brooks, Ernie Henry or Bill Hardman.

Monk’s improvisations were informed by his compositions; Bird’s compositions were informed by his improvisations. In that assessment, they couldn’t be more opposite, and lumping Monk in willy-nilly with a ‘be-bop revolution’ is misleading to a point. He has a very different kind of genius than Bird – more a composer’s genius. One might put him in a lineage that includes Duke Ellington.

That would also be limiting, though. Monk, like Sonny Rollins, was also an incredible improviser who soloed with that same ‘waiting at the bus stop’ nonchalant greatness as Bird. His solo on ‘I Mean You’ may refer to the melody of the song, take it apart, and reconstruct it. But that was within the context of an improvisation, one that had the same killer casual profundity of Bird. Monk was certainly not getting caught in the net of his own compositional logic; he was just being a genius.

These guys were stubborn, though, and wouldn’t back down; neither would we. We finally sulkily ‘agreed to disagree’. A distinctly ideological strain had infected the discussion, killing our buzz.

In politics, ideology is dangerous – from 20th Century examples down to the present ‘Washington Consensus’. Ideology pastes what appears to be a thought-out argument onto a substantive claim that is more animalistic than logical in nature: “Because of facts A, B, and C, we should all band together in a tribe and demonize those other people.” Ideology uses logic selectively, in a sneaky, backhanded manner. Its aim is that we actually suspend our sense of logic and, with it, our moral radar. Then we’ll be in mute complicity with what’s to come.

Musical ideology is similar in that it asks us to suspend our aesthetic judgments and acquiesce to its claims. It collects facts and interprets them broadly in the same manner: “You cannot dig this music as much as that music because…” Why do we often identify practitioners of jazz ideology as conservative? It’s because of the parental, Old Testament ring to their utterances. Those utterances are analogous to the quasi-religious words of the Bush administration, spoken to us as if we are children who still believe in Santa Claus. Because of the specious, ideological tone, though, we cannot trust this parent and do not look up to it. We don’t like being told what to enjoy musically anymore than we like being told what constitutes being patriotic.

There’s another kind of musical ideology, though, that’s more self-imposed and private. I can identify it in myself, although it’s hidden under a veneer of it’s-all-goodism. I think many of us carry around some kind of ideology about jazz to varying degrees, because its marginalized status in American music stokes our partisan fury that much more. (See: Ken Burns documentary.) This kind of ideology bothers me because it’s intractable. It hasn’t been imposed on me by some outside authority; it’s my own personal dogma. Is it perhaps steering my whole aesthetic sense covertly, calling the shots from behind a curtain in the shadows of my Id?

For instance: Is my lack of enjoyment of most of what’s called pop music these days simply because it sucks, or is it because I’m unwittingly locked in the grips of a musical elitist ideology? Maybe I’m missing something vital; maybe I’ve become the proverbial old fart! Where does the ideological baggage stop and the real pleasure begin? Is there a hard line between the two, or are they all mixed up in each other? Perhaps they’re not entirely severable.

I have music that I love, and ideology is a weapon that I might use to defend and argue my love, which is tempting but absurd. After all, how do you defend a gut level emotion? What’s more, why would you? Kierkegaard writes wisely, “To defend something is to disparage it.” It’s the mantra of the high road. If you love something, you should be all quiet and spiritual about it, not needing to justify it, right? Wrong! How could we survive without the bitchy, bickering fun of polemics?

Maybe we get defensive over our various musical loves because they define who we are. Love is exclusionary. You can’t love everything, all the time. That goes for a critic or layman, and also for musicians. When you build your identity as a player, you do so in part by excluding a bunch of other identities, at least temporarily. That process of exclusion is determined by the gut, not the intellect. It’s tied up in the murky morass of subjectivity – early musical and non-musical experiences, innate personality traits, etc…

We laid that process of exclusion bare as we played the name-game. The arbitrary humor of the game was a salve, a way of keeping our own self-irony lest we lapse into ideology like we did that one night. At the end of the day, we all dug Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins both. It was a name pair that just shouldn’t have been uttered in the first place.

Whatever the case, I’ve discovered something great about listening to music and playing it. You may necessarily exclude great chunks of music in the process of building up your aesthetic. You can always surprise yourself later on, though, when music that you weren’t initially ready for reveals itself to you in all its beauty.

If only our government would surprise itself and us in the same way. At its present course, it is opting for the exclusionary course, guarding its belief with a desperate, violent love, full of folly. It is truly disparaging the thing it defends.

© Brad Mehldau, September, 2003