and heartfelt anguish
we stand with
the Virginia Tech campus

Letter from President Hill in response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

“Rain Rain Go Away,” a VT tribute from Jin.

A rock tune on “Make the Logo Bigger.” And I thought Visualgui.com is big and messy.

Welcome to the world of Wal-Mart.

Sharing Mong Thuy’s lovely rendition of Pham Duy’s “Roi Day Anh Se Dua Em Ve Nha” makes me seem like a romantic pussycat, but I do it for love. Believe it or not, Donny has a heart too, despite what people might have perceived him as, and it takes a real woman to see it.

Once again, Mong Thuy’s voice wraps around the keyboard like hand in glove, and that piano solo is a pain killer.

His recent work, Sound Grammar, has won the Pulitzer Prize for music. The man deserves it. He has been a jazz innovator since 1959.

Why need to go all the way to Niagara Falls when you live close by Wappingers Falls. On my way home from work yesterday, I saw people gathering around the bridge so I was curious to check it out. I took out my camera and captured the tremendous flow of water left from the storm.

Francis Davis’ “Hip-Hop Is Dead to Him” is an excellent piece on Wynton Marsalis’ From the Plantation to the Penitentiary:

The whole thing becomes embarrassing only on “Where Y’All At?,” when ego escalates into hubris and Marsalis tries to beat “big baggy-pants wearers with the long white T-shirts” at their own game. “They’re rapping straight in the time,” he criticizes the hip-hop his teenage sons listen to in a recent JazzTimes Q&A. “I told them, ‘I’m gonna come up with a rap that goes all across the time.’ ” When I interviewed him years ago, around the time he was still being accused of copying ’60s Miles, Marsalis replied it might sound that way to someone who didn’t listen to much jazz, the same way all string quartets might sound alike to someone who hadn’t heard very many. I take it from “Where Y’All At?” that Marsalis hasn’t heard much recent hip-hop. Neither have I, but I’ve heard enough to know it’s become a producer’s medium—the polyrhythmic tension comes from the way the rhymes move in and out of the samples and the abrasive string arrangements. A New Orleans shuffle and a chorus refrain worthy of a junior high school assembly sing-along prove to be no substitutes, Marsalis comes off sounding like a cranky grandpa, and the entire exercise reeks of misguided noblesse oblige—an attempt to “improve” hip-hop by means of better musicianship and high-minded ideals.

Even before reading Marsalis say in JazzTimes that “Supercapitalism” was inspired by ATM fees and hidden charges on his credit card bill, I found myself thinking someone featured in Movado watches was on shaky ground dissing anybody else for wanting to live large. But Penitentiary‘s drawback as social criticism isn’t just its hypocrisy in omitting Marsalis’s own penthouse from the alliterative equation. This is a protest album staunch Republicans could get behind, inasmuch as it preaches the gospel of personal responsibility as the only foolproof way out of poverty and degradation: “Don’t turn up your nose/It’s us that’s stinkin’,” Marsalis rants on “Where Y’All At?,” “And it all can’t be blamed on the party of Lincoln.” “No Vietcong ever called me nigger,” Muhammad Ali famously proclaimed while resisting military induction in the ’60s. Marsalis’s message to black youth often seems to be “No white man ever called me nigga,” and while it’s a message not without merit, it’s simply not enough. I’m not saying go back to blaming Whitey, but don’t let him wiggle off the hook, either.

Kicked back to a comfy couch, listened to a Vassar student played some sweet Joplin tunes while the rain pouring outside. Finished up my last sip of tea, walked back to office, turned to CNN, someone painted Virginia Tech red. Damn!

You’re probably sick and tired of hearing and seeing the name Imus already, but Bakari Kitwana’s “The Style, But Not The Substance” makes out some points about the misuse of hip-hop slang:

The result is what cultural critic Greg Tate addressed in his 2005 book, “Everything but the Burden.” That is, far too many American consumers of black popular culture don’t take the time to decode the complexity of black life that produces a 50 Cent, a Jay-Z or a Russell Simmons, multi-millionaires all, who peddle rap music riddled with the language of the street.

He also nailed the part where Imus pointed the figure at hip-hop:

Imus – and his defenders who claim they learned this language from hip-hop – are only partly correct, even as they are wholly dishonest. They would do themselves and the country a service by owning up to at least three facts. 1) Imus took liberty with a culture that he didn’t fully understand, and when he got called on it, rather than coming clean, he pointed the finger at hip-hop to take the weight. 2) Clearly those far more powerful than rappers are complicit in bringing pimp and ho talk to the American mainstream. 3) If indeed Imus is a hip-hop fan, innocently consuming its language and aesthetics, that doesn’t remove him from the responsibility to understand hip-hop cultural and political roots in all their complexity.

The Hawaiian ‘Tiny Bubbles’ crooner, that is.