Forget Dancing With The Stars. Let’s “Dancin’ the Boogie.” The band is off the hook.

In his solo interpretation of “Body & Soul,” Thelonious Monk deviated from the original to the point where it became a complete new composition. In the opening, he only played half of a bar of the recognizable melody and drifted off into his own “sphere” and occasionally came back to it. It drove me nuts while I was driving because I couldn’t figure out what the tune was but it has that familiar sound in it. The beauty in Monk’s style is the fractured chords and bent notes (yes he could bend notes on a piano). The way he handled the beat in his left and chords in the right is simply amazing. He’s doing two separate things at once like rubbing your belly while tapping your head.

Straight, No Chaser, an exceptional documentary on a phenomenal jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, is available on You(guess-it-right)Tube. I don’t know how many times I have come back to this film just to watch Monk played. I have many favorite jazz pianists, but Monk’s idiosyncrasies both in his music and personality have always intrigued me.

Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World.

Also: Vietnamese are the new Irish among Catholic priests.

In his Autobiography, Prince of Darkness complimented on his pianist: “Bill [Evans] had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.” After listening to “All Blues,” I was like, “Miles was not bullshitting.” No wonder he always had the best players gave in to him. By the way, I can’t get enough of that crisp drums from Jimmy Cobb. Too damn sensual.

Guitarist Pat Metheny naturally do not share a mutual respect with Kenny G when he castigates G’s overdubbing of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” as “lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up…,” but he does share his vision with pianist Brad Mehldau whose lyrical approach reminds me of Bill Evans on their invigorating collaboration. Backing up by Mehldau’s bulletproof rhythm section, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard, Metheny’s hypnotic riffs in unison with Mehldau’s melodic lines produced some of the most delightful grooves in contemporary jazz. From airy atmosphere to serene chaos to exquisite sound of water, the varying in tempos brings unique colors, textures and moods to the overall experience.

In “White America,” a song from Slim Shady’s The Eminem Show, he raised a question: “Sitting back looking at shit, wow, I’m like… my skin… Is it starting to work to my benefit now?” No Em, your skin has benefited from black art and culture for years according to essays, poems and a conversation in Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture edited by Greg Tate. In the book intro, Tate points out:

Readers of Black music history are often stuck by the egregious turns of public relations puffery that saw Paul Whiteman crowned the King of Swing in the 1920s, Benny Goodman anointed the King of Jazz in the 1930s, Elvis Presley propped up as the King of Rock and Roll in the 1950s, and Eric Clapton awarded the title of the world’s greatest guitar player (ostensibly of the blues) in the 1960s. Whatever Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Chuck Berry, B. B. King, and other African-American pioneers thought about these coronations, they seem to have wisely kept between pursed lips—at least until Little Richard declared himself “the architect of rock and roll” rather than announce the winner at a late-eighties Grammy Awards ceremony.

Then in “The New White Negro,” Carl Hancock Rux chops up Em with quite a sharp blade:

Rappers Big Boi and Dre may go by the moniker Outkast, but Eminem proves that a real outcast has got to do more than make Miss Jackson’s daughter cry—you got to fuck the bitch, kill the bitch, dump the bitch’s dead body in the river, and not apologize for any of it.

It gets mad brutal:

Niggaz may talk bad about bitches and they baby’s mama—Eminem brutally murders his. Niggaz may have issues regarding absent fathers or dysfunctional mothers—Eminem comically exposes their dysfunctions, and hangs his mother’s pussy high up on a wall for all the world to see. Niggaz may be misogynist, may boast of sexual superiority and sexual indiscretions with a multitude of women, may commonly relegate women to just another piece of ass prime for the taking status—but Eminem drugs the bitch, fucks the bitch, moves on to the next bitch.

Welcome to the surrealistic world of Eminem! Like Sir Elton John alleviated us that we shouldn’t “take him seriously.”

Congratulation on the newborn. He sure is adorable. Wonder if she will sing Giot Suong Bay Len as his lullabies.

My favorite scene from Malcolm X portraited by Denzel Washington. YouTube isn’t doing the dance the justice here. Much better on DVD. But then again, YouTube got it.

It amazes me that I made a post on our darling Trish almost three years ago and the comments are still rolling in. The latest one was yesterday. One time, an eight-year-old girl posted her address as well as her phone numbers on the comment. How did I know? Her daddy requested me to take down the info. Also a comment from no body reads, “yall shut the BEEP up…ok? yall are lucky i dont cuse…ok? im watching this web site…ok? i have my way of geting to people…….OK? untill tall shut up ill be watching…” Man, I ain’t messing around with Trish no more.