Who else but the originator Jay-Z. “Nigga What Nigga Who” showcases his ferocious flow. Still love that shit!

Jin is rooting for the Democratic presidential candidate with his “Open Letter to Obama.” The hook is kind of wack.

I was in Las Vegas’s Barnes & Noble looking for a book to kill my flight time back to New York. I encountered David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim on a bargain table and decided immediately it was the book to accompany me after reading the following passage:

Lauren was Walt’s sister, who was born prematurely and lived for less than two days. This had happened before the Winterses moved onto our street, but it wasn’t any kind of secret, and you weren’t suppose to flinch upon hearing the girl’s name. The baby had died too soon to pose for photographs, but still she was regarded as a full-fledged member of the family. She had a Christmas stocking the size of a mitten, and they even threw her annual birthday party, a fact that my mother found especially creepy. “Let’s hope she don’t invite us,” she said. “I mean, Jesus, how do you shop for a dead baby.”

Because of his articulate writing, he could make his dark humors lid up. With a collection of 27 essays, Sadaris takes us into the eccentric stories of his family. The book sure helped me get through the three-hour delay from Chicago to New York. This is definitely a perfect traveling read.

Yes, I still am in my Vegas state of mind, especially when listening to Ray Charles sings, “I sat there with two tens / I thought I’d have some fun / The dealer hit sixteen with a five / Just enough to make twenty one.” Fortunately, I was not the unlucky guy. In fact, I was having fun at the last Pai Gow game, which last until three in the morning.

There were a female dealer who was Chinese and hardly spoke any English, a Korean guy on her right, a hot American grandma (think The 40 Year Old Virgin) from Texas, a crazy Filipino who is a local cab driver, and me. The cab driver always played two hands when he was asked to take over the extra hand. His claim was that he has two wives to support. Then he was telling us his work jokes. One time he picked up three senior women who were in thier 60s from the airport to Golden Nugget. They asked him where is the best place to stay in LV and he told them there’s a place right next to the Nugget. They asked him if that place has senior citizens discount. He told them they are free. They were very excited until he pointed out the Detention Center. One of the ladies hit his head with a magazine. We were too busy laughing and listening to his story that we weren’t pay attention to the game. The dealer didn’t quite understand what we are musing about so she made us played our hands.

Finally we get to hear Nguyen Hong Nhung speaks out about her scandals in the past. Just when I thought she doesn’t seem to be an airhead after all, she comes off criticizing the music in Viet Nam as “cheap” while her lastest two albums (Dau Co Loi Lam and Di Vang Cuoc Tinh) are sprinkled with the “cheap” tunes she was talking about.

Watch part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Viva Vision: The biggest big screen on the planet!
Piano solo rendition of “Love Story” (I listened to this guy all night)

Just noticed the new Apple site. The navigation has been trimmed to down a simple set and the Spotlight search is very slick.

Freeway’s “Big Spender” featuring Jay-Z
Saigon’s “What A Life” featuring Tre Williams
Kyle Spratt’s “Slim Sellout,” Eminem’s real “Stan”

In the concise biographical chapter of Lester Young, jazz scholar Lewis Porter emphasizes that the language used by one of the best saxophonists of his time was, “sprinkled generously with four-letter words,” but never offensive. As quoted in Reverend John Gensel’s statement, “Lester’s flow of obscenity was magnificent. Nor was it really obscene, because it was not aggressive and was said as his personal poetry. No one, surely, but Prez could say ‘mother-fucker’ like music, bending the tones until it was a blues.” As for his music, Young was an original artist. At the time when jazz musicians were under the spell of Coleman Hawkins, Young leaped into the jazz scene with a style of his own. To prove the distinction between the two tenor saxophonists, Porter points out that Hawkins had “a rich, guttural tone, a wide, fast vibrato, and a stunning command of his instrument” while Young had “a softer tone and more legato articulation until, by 1939, he had developed the famous ethereal, feathery quality that inspired Stan Gets, Zoot Sims, and thousands of other musicians.” As always, Porter’s meticulous technical details are both pleasure and insightful to read.

VOA in Vietnamese’s Truong Ky produce another program on Ngoc Lan due to the numerous requests.