"Shades of Bob MacKenzie"
or "Beer - Is there anything it isn't good for"

Man pees way out of avalanche
A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.
Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains.

RIP Lucien Carr - journalist and key beat figure
Newsman Lucien Carr Dies at 79
By Martin WeilWashington Post Staff WriterSaturday, January 29, 2005; Page B05
"Lucien Carr, 79, who was a friend of the Beat Generation writers since their college days and who spent decades as a mainstay of one of the major news wire services, died Jan. 28 at George Washington University Hospital.
Mr. Carr, who lived in Washington and was retired after 47 years at United Press International, had cancer, according to his longtime companion, Kathleen Silvassy.
Accounts of the founding of the Beat Generation often credit Mr. Carr with bringing together such celebrated figures of the movement as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. "


Carr is the reason the three main writers of the Beat movement - Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg were aware of each other. Without his relatively minor action of introducing the three, there would have been no Beat Generation. And his news career is nothing to sneeze at either. Now if certain of my friends, relations and assorted former schoolmates would just go out and publish, compose and record some classic art - It doesn't have to be on par with HOWL or On The Road - I could have a cool obit someday soon.

He's got a little list
And I knew we'd be on it.


President's To Do List

Unflinching portrait of the Genius of Soul
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Ray 4 stars (out of five)
Dir: Taylor Hackford
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King

Biopics often fall into the trap of hagiography, trying to present their subject in the best possible light. Not so with Ray, director Taylor Hackford's warts-and-all (or nearly so) depiction of Ray Charles.

Charles' story is an inspirational one: He overcame poverty, blindness and racial prejudice to become an American institution and one of the most beloved and groundbreaking figures in modern music.

At the same time, he was a selfish, egotistical, unrepentant womanizing junkie who sometimes neglected his family and was often disloyal to his friends. But they didn't call him "The Genius" for nothing.

The opening scene of Ray tells us all we need to know about the man. It is 1948 and a young blind black man stands alone at a rural Florida bus stop. When the white driver finds out the young man's destination is Seattle, he states in no uncertain terms that the man isn't coming aboard because he doesn't have time to babysit some "crippled colored boy." Charles meekly mentions having "left my eyes at Omaha Beach," and the driver relents. The young man's confident, knowing smile as he boards the bus tells us the story is a scam, but the incident demonstrates Charles' creativity, independence and talent for giving people what they wanted to hear, whether they knew what they wanted or not.

Musically, Charles fused the gospel of his childhood with the rhythm and blues he played working his way up through the "chitlin circuit" of the South. The results both scandalized and enticed churchgoers across the country. Melding the sacred with the sensual gave Brother Ray a sound that could make a preacher kick a hole in a stained-glass window and revolutionized popular music.

Naturally, music plays a huge role in the film, setting the mood and driving the narrative. In one scene, when his backup singers storm out of the studio after an argument, we watch as Charles records all the harmony background vocals on "I Believe to My Soul" with the help of an awestruck sound engineer.

The Genius, who died last year, rerecorded some of his most famous songs for the film, and I'd have happily paid to sit in a dark room and listen to the soundtrack. The fact that there is a nearly great movie attached to it--just nominated for the best picture Oscar--is just gravy.

It takes a genius to play a genius, and Jamie Foxx had better start clearing a spot on his mantle for the richly deserved Oscar for which he is now officially in the running. Foxx doesn't just play Brother Ray, he channels the man's every twitch, grin, sway and cackle, brilliantly capturing the man's exuberance and considerable charm while hinting at the darker side simmering beneath the surface.

Foxx is backed by a terrific supporting cast. Kerry Washington shines as Charles' wife Della Bea, as does Regina King in the role of Margie Hendricks, the Raelette who "let Ray" and became one of his many mistresses.

Character actor Curtis Armstrong puts in a scene-stealing turn as Atlantic Records' nerdy Ahmet Ertegun, nervously performing a song he has written, "Mess Around," which became one of Charles' early hits.

Sharon Warren gives a powerful, layered performance in her film debut as a fierce but loving mother in heartwrenching flashbacks to Ray Charles Robinson's dirt-poor childhood in the Georgia backwoods. At age 5, he watches, rooted to the spot, as his younger brother drowns in a washtub. A few months later his eyesight begins to fade. The condition is treatable, but there is no money for doctors. By age 7, he is blind.

Some of the most emotional scenes show Warren's character suffering silently as she tries to instill some independence in her son, forcing him to navigate their cramped cabin unaided. "You're blind, not dumb; you lost your sight, not your mind," she says, before sending him off to a school for the blind 240 kilometers from home before his 10th birthday.

Her death at 31 while Charles was away at school forces him to fend for himself and helps him become a savvy, occasionally ruthless businessman.

Haunted by his brother's death and the loneliness of life on the road, Charles numbs himself with heroin and spends hours alone at the piano while his bandmates are out carousing. His long-running addiction finally catches up with him in 1965, when he is arrested for possession and narrowly avoids jail by entering rehab.

Hackford's direction and James L. White's script are occasionally wooden, and some factual liberties have been taken. A 1979 scene of Ray accepting an apology from the Georgia State Legislature for barring him from performing after he refused to abide by Jim Crow laws shows him with Della Bea at his side, though the two actually divorced in 1977. Charles' brief first marriage to Eileen Williams, who bore him a child, is not mentioned, nor are some of his illegitimate children.

Other things the film doesn't tell us--that after kicking heroin, Charles continued smoking marijuana and drinking copious amounts of gin and very rarely composed new music--reflect the prevailing puritan attitude toward drugs, and Hollywood's own addiction to happy endings.

These minor problems take little away from what's on the screen, and any clunkiness is overcome by the strength of the performances and the music. Foxx's career-making performance alone is worth twice the price of admission.

The movie opens (in Japan) Jan. 29.
Copyright 2005 The Yomiuri Shimbun

"this is so frickin' cool"

check out this excellent multimedia plaything
Pianographique

What going on in Iraq
This guy is the real deal, a freelancer who is not embedded and not holed up in the green zone 24/7Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches

"Ouch" just doesn't cover it

Woman rips off ex-lover's testicle

Why you shouldn't read Plato in the breakroom

Another of those 'only in Japan' type stories - Two bus drivers were recently fired for having college degrees.

"Let us win your hearts and minds or we'll burn your fucking huts down"

As General William Westmoreland famously said "When you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow." Clearly this stroke of strategic genius worked so well in Vietnam, the U.S. has decided to revive such methods in Iraq.
Clearly freedom is on the march...straight into the toilet.

"Yet armies can be good at war-fighting or good at peacekeeping but rarely good at both. And when America's well-drilled and well-fed fighters attempt subtler tasks than killing people, problems arise. At peacekeeping, peace-enforcing or policing, call it what you will, they are often inept. Even the best of them seem ignorant of the people whose land they are occupying —unsurprisingly, perhaps, when practically no American fighters speak Arabic. And, typically, the marine battalion in Ramadi has only four translators. Often American troops despair of their Iraqi interlocutors, observing that they “are not like Americans”.

American marines and GIs frequently display contempt for Iraqis, civilian or official. Thus the 18-year-old Texan soldier in Mosul who, confronted by jeering schoolchildren, shot canisters of buckshot at them from his grenade-launcher. “It's not good, dude, it could be fatal, but you gotta do it,” he explained. Or the marines in Ramadi who, on a search for insurgents, kicked in the doors of houses at random, in order to scream, in English, at trembling middle-aged women within: “Where's your black mask?” and “Bitch, where's the guns?” In one of these houses was a small plastic Christmas tree, decorated with silver tinsel. “That tells us the people here are OK,” said Corporal Robert Joyce. "

see the whole story from the Economist (which incidently, supported the war and still does)

In your ear
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
PAT METHENY GROUP
The Way Up
Warner, 2,625 yen
Picking up where 2002's Speaking of Now left off, the Pat Metheny Group take contemporary jazz to a new level on The Way Up. Composed by guitar ace Metheny and longtime creative partner and keyboardist Lyle Mays, The Way Up is an ambitious 68-minute modern jazz concerto divided into four movements.

Within those 68 minutes, Metheny and Mays cover the waterfront, building from opening traffic sounds to a driving beat that evokes a train leaving the station; not some rural bluesman's steam locomotive, but a sleek, ultramodern smooth-running high-speed Shinkansen. The band alternately soars to majestic heights and swoops to intimate depths, scorning the brazen peaks of self-indulgence and depths of soporific navel gazing for an original and eminently listenable exploration of the complex spaces between the two extremes.

Metheny says on his Web site: "At the time we started writing, we saw this as a kind of protest record. It could be seen as our protest against a world where fear has become a cultural and political weapon, a protest against a world where a lack of nuance and detail is considered a good thing, a protest against a culture that values that which can be consumed in small bites over the kinds of efforts and achievements that can only come with a lifetime of work and study."
A 30-year veteran with an armload of Grammys to his credit, Metheny is one of the most talented and distinctive guitarists of the electric era. Mays too, is something of a virtuoso and both are in fine form here, soloing extensively over the more-than-able backing of longtime bassist Steve Rodby and more-recent bandmate, drummer Antonio Sanchez. This core group is joined by trumpeter Coung Vu, guitarist Nando Lauria and harmonica wizard Gregoire Maret.

Vu shines throughout the album, haunting the background with intricate, atmospheric playing reminiscent of Miles Davis' more experimental work. Maret's soulful solo over brushed drums and muted piano in the third movement calls to mind some of John Coltrane's earlier, bluesier playing.

The Way Up reveals a group of exceptional musicians in peak form performing an exceptional composition.
===
TORCH
Before the Night is Over
Buffalo Records, 2,381 yen

On the flip side of the jazz coin from the complex progressive fusion of the Pat Metheny Group is the smooth retro simplicity of Torch, an Austin, Texas-based trio whose stock in trade is standards and reasonable facsimiles thereof.

Showcasing the potent voice of Seela Misra, Torch relies on Jon Greene's minimalist drums and Chris Vestre's sparse, melodic guitar for instrumental muscle. Guest bassist Chris Maresh rounds out the group.

With eight of the 12 tracks penned by the band, calling Torch a standards band may seem unfair, but their originals would not seem out of place on a Rosemary Clooney or Tony Bennett album circa 1957. Yet nothing here sounds forced, nostalgic or ironic.

Misra's coy vocals may stray perilously near cutesy at times, but there is a lioness behind the Shirley Temple pose--her rendition of Gershwin's "Nice Work If You Can Get It" takes a backseat to no one, and while composition credits are shared among the band, hers seem to be the dominant voice on such new standards as the post-last call "Nowhere Else to Be."

Stir up a pitcher of martinis, dim the lights and curl up with that special someone. As the title of the band's previous album says, this is Music to Stay Home To.

Just what the well dressed librarian needs for overdue book raid

http://www.overduemedia.com/store.aspx?cat=jackets

Little Big Man
Check out my friend Jacob's site about his life in a sumo training stableIn the Hall of the Mountain Kings

Required holiday viewing The Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time

Spankers photos!

look way down at the bottom of the slides show to the after gig party in Tokyo and see me beering with Wammo and then go buy some Spankers stuff

U2 back in bombastic form

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

U2
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Universal, 2,548 yen

U2 returns to big, bombastic form with its first studio album in four years, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

The Irish quartet seem to have abandoned any pretense of trying to experiment or move in new directions and settled down to the formula that has always served them best: soaring anthems belted out over intense, echoing, layered guitar grooves backed by a whipcrack rhythm section.

The opening cut and first single "Vertigo" grabs the listener with a muscular hook and harrowing pace as Bono belts out some cliches about "swinging to the music." Despite the inane lyrics, the song serves notice that U2 is back and ready to rock in a way they haven't since Rattle and Hum.

The 24 years that have passed since their debut album have done little to diminish Bono's ability to go from a whisper to a scream, nor has his ego receded. As usual, the album winds up with the man who has the biggest collection of ugly eyeglasses this side of Elton John talking directly to God on "Yahweh." After that, the closing track, the Indian raga-tinged "Fast Cars" seems like a bit of an afterthought.

The death of the singer-lyricist's father in 2001 has obviously sparked a bit of reflection as parental love pops up as a theme on several cuts, especially the best of the album's ballads, "Sometimes You Can't Make it on Your Own."

Bono's high-profile political activism colors much of the material here as well. Bumper sticker-worthy lines such as "Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die" in the song "Crumbs from Your Table" are hardly ambiguous. That is not to say that the message interferes with the music--far from it. The call to arms "Love and Peace or Else" rides the top of a dangerous John Lee Hooker riff that makes it one of the strongest songs on the album.

The Edge has plenty of echoboxes and digital delays and isn't afraid to use them. He and longtime producer have layered rhythm guitar tracks that propel even the more pedestrian tunes like "City of Blinding Lights" forward.

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is everything a U2 album should be: Grandiose, pompous, loud, dynamic and driving. It is about as subtle as a sledgehammer between the eyes, and nearly as effective.

Joni Mitchell
Dreamland
Warner, 2,520 yen

Dreamland supposedly marks Joni Mitchell's final retirement from what she has referred to as the "cesspool"--the modern music industry. The 17-track compilation showcases some of the best and worst of her eclectic four-decade career "stoking the star maker machinery behind the popular song."

The best is very good indeed with jazzy gems like "Help Me," hits like "Big Yellow Taxi" and "You Turn Me On I'm a Radio" and more recent orchestra-backed performances of her early folk classic "Both Side Now" and "For the Roses."

The worst comes in the form of the sweet-voiced songstress' ill-advised '80s duet with Billy Idol, "Dancin' Clown," though it is not wholly without merit, at least as a curiosity. Curiouser still are the sins of omission--no "River" or "Court and Spark" and nothing from the creatively brilliant commercial flop Mingus.

A good introduction to a complex and challenging body of work by a unique talent, but not much different in the choice of material from her Hits and Misses compilation of a few years ago

The family that steals together, stays together
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Hot Plastic
By Peter Craig
Hyperion, 341 pp, 13.00 dollars
Fraudster, confidence artist, sharpie, flimflam man, grifter, hustler--call him what you want, but the clever guy who makes his living by pulling the wool over the eyes of his victims instead of pulling a gun on them has always been a popular cultural icon.
Never mind for a moment that the heroic thief of popular fiction, who robs exclusively from the rich and corrupt, bears little resemblance to the real crooks who line their pockets with the life savings of gullible seniors and struggling families. The guy who is able to cheat, lie, trick and fast-talk the hapless mark into handing over his cash is admired for getting something for nothing, using only his wits and a snappy line of patter.
Peter Craig's Hot Plastic shows us the evolution of fraud and credit card technology in the 1980s by following the growth of top-notch grifter from teenage tagalong to international pro, and also introduces a family of thieves whose sum is both greater and less than its parts.
Hot Plastic opens cinematically, with a man bleeding from a gunshot wound into a stolen coat in a stolen car being smuggled by his partner past the watchful eyes of the police, and proceeds in flashbacks tells us how he got there.
Kevin Swift starts out on the road with his father at age 12. His mother has just died and his dad is fresh out of prison. An obsessive kid with few social skills, Kevin has a number of personality tics, including a pathological need for rigid order in the matter of packing and unpacking suitcases and an insistence on eating nothing but pancakes and sliced oranges, that seem to be a reaction to the otherwise complete disorder of his life.
Kevin's father, Jerry, is a small-time crook traveling the United States pedaling fake credit cards with real numbers, running up huge charges on stolen card numbers and generally living off the land, stealing whatever he needs one way or another. At first, Jerry tries to keep his work a secret from Kevin, but by the time Kevin turns 15, the two are working partners. With Kevin laid low by the flu the day a major deal is to be made, Jerry is forced to hire a hooker to babysit. Colette isn't much older than Kevin and the boy develops a lasting crush on her even as she is falling for Jerry. The three start working together, with Colette teaching Kevin how to shoplift, a craft in which he eventually surpasses her--to the extent where he regularly steals the family groceries a cartload at a time.
After a few years, Colette falls out with Jerry over her ambition to move into more elaborate, lucrative and longer-term cons and he and Kevin settle down in Los Angeles with Jerry's new wife. Kevin, in school for the first time in half a dozen years, finds it a struggle, and eventually one of Jerry's scams blows up in his face, landing him in prison and leaving Kevin on his own.
A few years later, after his own brush with jail, Kevin flees to Europe with Colette. Eventually, the three are reunited for a final scam they hope will allow them to retire.
Each of the three main characters are drawn in detail with their unique voices and very real identities and motivations hidden beneath all their deceptions. The odd love triangle breeds divided loyalties and wholly believable conflicts that shape the fabric of the characters and story. Craig never cheats on plot details by pulling story elements out of thin air, but instead gradually, and with an enviable subtlety, develops his complex plot to its de rigueur, yet still surprising, shock ending.
Hot Plastic has all the Hollywood playfulness of The Sting compellingly combined with the dark grittiness of Jim Thompson's The Grifters.

Dumb all over, a little ugly on the side

People outside the United States and many within it often look at the USA with its mindless fundementalist fanatics, daytime talk shows, tabloids, conspiracy kooks and Paris Hilton, not to mention the White House, and ask "How dumb are Americans?"

Well according to this basic scientific literacy poll done by the U.S. National Science Foundation the answer is "pretty frickin' dumb"

According to the survey:

• 65% of Americans either don't know or don't believe that Evolution is a valid scientific theory.
• 25% believe that the Sun goes around the Earth
• 52% believe that humans once coexisted with dinosaurs
• 46% don't know how long it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun

A little Kristmas music
Jesus was a capricorn
He ate organic food
He believed in love and peace
And never wore no shoes
Long hair, beard and sandles
And a funky bunch of friends
Reckon we’d just nail him up
If he came down again

Chorus:
'cause everybody’s gotta have somebody that they can look down on
Somebody they can feel better than at any time they please
Someone doin’ somethin’ dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to me

Eggheads cussing rednecks cussing
Hippies for their hair
Others laugh at straights who laugh at
Freaks who laugh at squares
Some folks hate the whites
Who hate the blacks who hate the klan
Most of us hate anything that
We don’t understand

--Oil empire heir, Rhodes scholar, chopper pilot, studio janitor and Billy the Kid impersonator Kris Kristofferson

Hardboiled detective strictly softheaded
Drop Dead My Lovely?
By Ellis Weiner
New American Library
277 pp, $23.95
By Kevin Wood
Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

After falling off a ladder and under several boxes of books while searching for a Ross MacDonald novel, Peter Ingalls, mild-mannered recluse and bookstore clerk, wakes up a new man. He pockets a handsome insurance settlement, rents himself an office and puts this ad in the newspaper:
“Gumshoe…Dick…Shamus…Flatfoot – Put them all together, they spell Peter Ingalls, P.I.”
Thus begins Ellis Weiners’s Drop Dead My Lovely, a marvelous satirical homage to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and all their literary descendents in the hardboiled detective genre.
Speaking and dressing like Humphrey Bogart in the “The Maltese Falcon”, Ingalls can certainly talk the talk: All the “dames” he meets are addressed as “doll” or “angel” while the men are “soldier” or “chief” and the first person narration is straight out of cinema noir. Ingalls constant asides about “the code” and the importance of remaining loyal to his client are off-the-rack standard issue in hardboiled private eye fiction, but are presented here with a cockeyed touch certain to amuse anyone who has ever skimmed a Robert B. Parker novel. Like most of the people he meets, Ingalls secretary isn’t sure what to think of him.
“”Um…Pete”
There it was. That “um.” I’d been hearing it all my life. The party of the second part was about to pop some frequently asked questions. “What? You’re on the air, kid.”
“Seriously. What’s up with you?”
“Come again, doll?”
“That. The way you talk. With all these ‘dolls’ and ‘angels.’ And these zoot-suity clothes. And the hat. This whole hardboiled thing. Are you serious or what?”
“Yeah, people ask me that all the time.”
“So? What do you say?”
“I say I’m just a guy trying to stay clean in a dirty world. I’m a professional, and wear what the professionals wear. Anybody who doesn’t like it can send an email to their congressman.”
Stephanie suddenly looked sly. She said, one con artist to another, “Come on, Pete. You can tell me. This is a put-on, right?”
“Lady,” I said, “you’re looking at a man who doesn’t do put-ons. Why? In self-defense. Because life as we know it is a put-on. The more you learn about the world, the more they change it into something else while you’re in bed reading The New Yorker. The more convinced you are that you know the score the bigger the pie they’re baking to hit you in the face with out on the street. All a mug can do in a world like this is be as deliberate as possible. In everything. Which brings us to the present conversation.”
She widened her eyes and recoiled a bit, and I thought, Well, well, Ingalls. Maybe you touched a nerve. Maybe this slice of the boss’s worldview hit home. Then she said, “Wow. You’re even more f----- up than I am.””
While Ingalls has the patter down, as a detective he is strictly softboiled, all fedora and no .45. He doesn’t seem to like he could detect water if he fell out of a boat – he constantly takes no for an answer, getting the brush-off from almost everyone he tries to question. He gets beaten to a pulp by a timid publishing executive and doesn’t recognize clues when he steps in them, thinking a pool of dried blood is brown paint. He consistently put two and two together and comes up with 22.
Fortunately for Ingalls, the aforementioned secretary, aspiring actress Stephanie Constantino, is a natural snoop and all-around busybody with investigative instincts worthy of Phillip Marlowe and a streak of Brooklyn toughness and foulmouthed vulgarity thrown in for good measure.
While much of Drop Dead My Lovely is given over to poking fun at the conventions of the hardboiled genre, it is also a clever murder mystery that hinges on Ingalls apparent cluelessness. All the standard Chandleresque plot elements - - greed, infidelity, seduction and betrayal – rear their heads as Ingalls stalks the mean streets of Manhattan, never quite getting it right.
Weiner has an obvious affection for the genre, and manages to remain respectful of its strengths while lampooning it. His knack for creating memorable supporting characters – loutish homicide cop Henry David Thoreau, television ranter Darius Flonger, his neglected manic-depressive wife Catherine and her man-eating friends – serves him well and prevents the book from becoming a one note joke along the lines of Steve Martin’s noir tribute “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” The mystery genre is home to many successful series and Weiner set himself up for a sequel at the end. With luck, Peter Ingalls next case will be as entertaining, ironic and sharp as his debut.

From the Daily Yomiuri, Nov. 14, 2004

Family portrait in Kimono from Nov. 17, 2004