NPR profiles the multi-instrumentalist Buddy Collette:
William Marcel Collette was born on Aug. 8, 1921, in the Watts district of Los Angeles. Along with saxophonist Dexter Gordon, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Chico Hamilton, he helped keep jazz alive in the city’s historic Central Avenue neighborhood. Buddy also played an important role in the development of the cool jazz movement.
Listen to the entire program here.
I’ve been following Ngo Thanh Van’s 360 on and off for the past few months. I like some of her personal thoughts.
Fox News goes at Nas again for his new album with a proposed title N-word. The clip used in this segment is the same clip in the O’Reilly Factor. N could also stands for Nas. Smartenup Fox!
No, I am not writing on a laptop, but on the good old pen and paper. I have been tempting to get me a MacBook, but still holding my temptation because I don’t it much other than to blog.
I excused myself out of work a bit early to get oil change. Had to drop by Burger King to pick up a coffee to get rid of my migraine. Yesterday, I tried to get through without coffee, and ended up taking an Aleve instead.
I got to the dealer and checked in. My four-year-old TL has ran 95,000 miles. I had to ask the serviceman a question I didn’t want to hear the answer: How much to replace the timing belt? The price is $1,150. Damn!
Kanye West’s tribute to Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt
Sasha Frere-Jones’ “A Paler Shade of White“:
By the mid-nineties, the biggest rock stars in the world were rappers, and the potential for embarrassment had become a sufficient deterrent for white musicians tempted to emulate their black heroes. Who would take on Snoop, one of the most naturally gifted vocalists of the day? Of course, a few did—there have been white rappers and several commercial, if generally unappealing, blends of rock and rap. But, in the thirty years since hip-hop became widely available, there have been only three genuinely popular white rap acts: the Beastie Boys, whose biggest selling album sold to kids who were more taken with the Led Zeppelin samples and the lewd jokes than with the rap music; Vanilla Ice, an anomaly who owes much of his success to his vertical hair and the decision to rap (in “Ice Ice Baby”) over “Under Pressure,” a song by David Bowie and Queen that has proved immune to destruction; and Eminem, the exception who proves the rule. A protégé of Dr. Dre’s who spent part of his youth in Detroit, he had to be better than the local black competition simply in order to be accepted—a fascinating inversion of the racism that many blacks have encountered in the workplace.
Anthony Lane reviews Lust, Caution (starts on the 2nd paragraph):
The new Ang Lee film, “Lust, Caution,” is opening wide across the country, and I consider it my responsibility to give prospective viewers the information they require. And here it is: ninety-five. That is the number of minutes that elapsed, by my watch, between the start of the film and the start of the sex, and from that you can calculate your own schedule. Those who enjoy lush costume dramas, and consider them a relief from the obscenity that bedevils modern cinema, can get up and leave after an hour and a half, thus sparing themselves the first, aggressive ravishment, and crossing paths in the foyer with their incoming opposites—honest types who can’t really enjoy a drama until the costume starts to come off.
Still, if the charges do turn out to be true, I am going to be disappointed as fuck. Because how dumb do you have to be? You’re one of the world’s most popular rappers, you just became maybe the first Southern rapper to headline Madison Square Garden, you sell millions of records during a time when nobody buys records, you have bodyguards, you’re a convicted felon on probation, and you know full well that police make it a point to follow rappers around and make arrests on the thinnest shreds of evidence, and you still send some chump to buy your machine guns? How dumb do you have to be? This comes a couple of days after Prodigy, the guy who made my favorite rap album of the year, accepted a three-and-a-half year charge for criminal gun possession and a few months after Lil Wayne, my favorite rapper right now, got arrested in New York on similar charges.
I asked the same question when I read the news.
Alex Ross’ “The Well-tempered Web“:
Classical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes alarming pace. When I started my blog, I had links to seven or eight like-minded sites. Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors, pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras, new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a première by a young British composer at the BBC Proms.
I have been blogging heavily three years straight. That’s a pretty damn long for a hobby and it doesn’t seem to be stopped any time soon. Blogging is fun and keeping me active. I want to write anything that comes to mind at the time. My ideas come mostly when I drive long hours alone. I want to think about something to keep me awake and help pass the time. I have done this many times in the past. Even when I wasn’t licensed to drive yet, I would sit in the backseat, stare out the window, and create some stories in my head. I did it during classes as well. I didn’t understand what my teacher said so I zoned out and lived in my fantasy inside my head.
The only different now is that I could write it down to my imaginary readers. Sort of like what Charles Mingus did in Mingus Presents Mingus. Before he began a piece, recorded in a studio, he would asked his imaginary audience not to clap, not to use the restroom during the performance, not to get a drink (no cash register ringing) because his band would be interrupted by the noise. For a while I was interrupted by the noise. I also tried to cater my topics to stir up the noise. I felt like I had to live up to the noise. I constantly had to deal with the noise. I shouldn’t have allowed the noise to impact me. I shouldn’t have invited the noise in the first place. Not everything was noise though.
Now all I have to do is imagining that I have a big audience flocking to the site everyday to read my blog. I just put up whatever topic I feel like fluffing. I don’t know why I am doing it, but I am enjoying it. In the near future, I might have to let this go and focus my attention on my little family. That day isn’t too far away at all. Will see how much it will affect this little online world of mine.