February 2009 Archives

A moment of silence, please, for the Rocky Mountain News, which published its final edition. I have a sentimental attachment to the paper because many years ago it helped me survive as a freelance. Its feature editors bought the arts stories I pitched them. They didn't have a large freelance budget, so they didn't buy as often as other major metro dailies. And they didn't pay as well. But every sale helped. The Denver Post, the Rocky's rival, never bought anything. Not once. As I recall, it never even responded to my pitches. I don't live in Colorado and don't read either paper. Maybe the Post is less aloof these days. Times change. But let me take a wild guess: The better of the two papers -- the one with more punch and personality -- is the one that died.

The classical music editor of The New York Times takes up his longtime role once again as chief media apologist for the Vienna Philharmonic. In a promotional article about the orchestra, James Oestreich plants a big wet kiss on Clemens Hellsberg, its chairman and archivist, lauding him as "a force for change." He dismisses the orchestra's continuing discrimination against women as a "female issue" not worth mentioning except in passing, let alone its exclusion of people of color. Oestreich also writes, "Probably no one knows better [than Hellsberg] what lies in the orchestra's past, especially during the Nazi years, for which it may need to make amends." May?

Today's promo follows a full-page ad in the print edition of the Times on Sunday, which announced the orchestra's concert tonight at Carnegie Hall, featuring conductor Zubin Mehta and Lang Lang at the piano, to benefit the National Academy Foundation. The ad thanked "corporate partners" for their largesse, listing such financial titans as that wonderful philanthropist Sanford I. Weill (of JP Morgan Chase & Co., formerly CEO and chairman of Citigroup), and announced a Lifetime Achievement Award for Peter G. Peterson (of the Blackstone Group, formerly Nixon's Secretary of Commerce). Ain't it all so cozy ...

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

And by the way ...

A laid-back tune for a lazy afternoon. It's by Fats Waller for a song he wrote with lyricist Andy Razaf. That's Dick Hyman playing.

The video was recorded by yours truly on Feb. 18, 2009, at the Living Room of Saint Peter's Church in Manhattan (Lexington Avenue & 54th Street). Hyman was appearing in a series called Midtown Jazz at Midday. Suggested donation? All of seven bucks. Which makes it one of the city's sweetest music bargains. He tickled the keys for more than an hour.

Before playing this particular tune he recounted an anecdote that belongs with it: Waller and Razaf were driving to Atlantic City, where they were going to work together on a song, when they were stopped by a traffic cop. After pleading for quite some time, Fats Waller simply said, "Well, officer, our fate is in your hands." Makes a good song title, Hyman remarked.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Obama preserved his civility. Too bad he still hasn't found a way to deep-six the deep voodo of Republican assholes like John McCain. Or reverse his own unwillingness to nationalize the banks. At least not so far. Ugh!

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Obama knocked it out of the park tonight at the Abe Lincoln bicentennial dinner in Springfield, Illinois. Stunning.

He created an unexpected word picture:

Here in Springfield, it is easier, perhaps, to reflect on Lincoln the man rather than the marble giant, before Gettysburg and Antietam, Fredericksburg and Bull Run, before emancipation was proclaimed and the captives were set free. In 1854, Lincoln was simply a Springfield lawyer, who'd served just a single term in Congress. Possibly in his law office, his feet on a cluttered desk, his sons playing around him, his clothes a bit too small to fit his uncommon frame, he put some thoughts on paper for what purpose we do not know: "The legitimate object of government," he wrote, "is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, by themselves."

And then Obama made the Union, its creation and survival, the central theme of his speech -- in the process rebuking those who have a "knee-jerk disdain for government" that offers only "this constant rejection of any common endeavor." The cherry on top was that he managed to do it without calling them Republican obstructionist assholes, thus preserving his civility.

Postscript: Feb. 12 -- Watch and listen. The speech is much more impressive as he delivered it, including the ad libs.

Part 1:

Part 2:

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

I came across this KPFA-FM radio recording by accident. It totally suprised me. I had no memory of it until I tuned in.

The archive at radiOM.org notes:

In a program that was recorded on Feb. 13, 1970, [in Berkeley, Cal.], Jan Herman reads from the 5th issue of his magazine "San Francisco Earthquake." The title of this particular issue was "VDRSVP." The reading includes works by Sinclair Beiles, Carl Solomon, Carl Weissner, Annie Rooney, and Jan Herman, chosen at random, and read here as if they were all part of the same piece. Jan Herman was at the time a publisher of avant-garde literature, who in addition to his magazine, also brought to print various pamphlets by Dick Higgins, Liam O'Gallagher, and William S. Burroughs under the Nova Broadcast imprint. This particular reading serves as a classic example of the sort of cut-up literary style that was championed by such writers as William S. Burroughs, and which was quite popular in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Hooray for me. Here's another link, so it must be true: A reading by Jan Herman (April 6, 1970). That's the date it was first broadcast. The intro is by Charles Amirkhanian, the composer. He was KPFA-FM's music director at the time.

The one-stop shop for all things William Burroughs, RealityStudio, has had a design overhaul. "I was really anxious not only to spruce up the site a bit, but to make the range of content more apparent," RS godfather Supervert says. "With the old site, a random visitor would have had no idea just how much content there is."

You want scholarship? There's Jed Birmingham on "the Burroughs connections and important small-press background that the recent obituaries of publisher Richard Seaver neglected to provide"; Ian MacFadyen on "the last painting of Brion Gysin," Burroughs' chief collaborator and a man of genius in his own right; and Oliver Harris on "the holy shit of Burroughs and Kerouac." Those are only the most recent attractions.

You want multimedia? Go to the RS video and audio page. You want news? Check out RS's sister site NakedLunch@50 on the upcoming celebration this summer in Paris. You want obsession? Have a look (via an RS link) at every book cover of every edition of every Burroughs book ever published. (I counted 437, domestic and foreign. Could there be others? I guess. The page modestly says it's "a selection.")

Speaking of book covers, activist Ginger Killian Eades is no slouch in that department. She made two slide shows of covers. Here they are: Transcontinental Junkie and WSB Books by HighJivers. She also reminded me of the swingingest version of Gysin's permutation poem, Junk Is No Good Baby. That's Gysin voice you hear, from 1962. Yeah.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Wanna see a cool slide show? Click the image of the collage, taken from an eye-popping exhibition of collages by Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach that was curated by John McWhinnie in New York, in 2007. I wrote about the exhibition when it opened.

Ginger Killian Eades created the slide show, which I think is a hands-down knockout. It displays the artwork from the exhibition as well if not better than the beautifully printed catalogue that McWhinnie put out. It also includes some collages that were not in the exhibition. Much thanks, Ginger.