farewell Buddy Miles


Down by the River


Electric Flag - Drinkin' Wine

it's a steel guitar, Speedy West kind of morning round the Manse...

Nicholson Baker on The Charms of Wikipedia

"The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P.G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman—all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn't been a waste of time—would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something. This wasn't like writing reviews on Amazon, where you were just one of a million people urging a tiny opinion and a Listmania list onto the world—this was an effort to build something that made sense apart from one's own opinion, something that helped the whole human cause roll forward.

Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all out—and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone's identity was hidden behind a jokey username. All everyone knew was that the end product had to make legible sense and sound encyclopedic..."

huge benefit for Scott Harding Order Tickets

A Benefit for the Scotty Hard Trust :: March 19, 2008 :: Highline Ballroom :: New York

Featuring:
Scotty Hard
John Scofield
John Medeski
Billy Martin
Bill Laswell
Eric Krasno
Neal Evans
Marco Benevento
Joe Russo
Antibalas
Sex Mob
DJ Logic
John Ellis
Michael Blake
Vijay Iyer
Tommy Hamilton
Kevin Kendrick

Music producer Scott Harding has recently been partly paralyzed in a car crash in New York. Without any health insurance he is facing very large medical fees.

100% of proceeds will be going to the Scotty Hard Trust.

Vancouver native and longtime New Yorker Scotty Hard has a long and varied list of production credits, including New Kingdom, Positive Black Soul, Charlie Hunter, Barney Bentall & the Legendary Hearts, Tricky, Crooklyn Dub, Dubadelic, Bailter Space, DJ Logic, Badar Ali Khan, Sex Mob, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Material, Soul Crib, Michael Blake, Chris Brown/Kate Fenner, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Metabolics, and Organ-ized. He also engineered and mixed pioneering music by Wu-Tang Clan, Gravediggaz, Jungle Brothers, Vernon Reid, Chris Rock, Ultrmagnetic MC's, Salif Keita, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, PM Dawn, De La Soul, Boogie Down Productions, Brand New Heavies, Prince Paul, Biz Markie, Chubb Rock, Teo Macero, and others.

March 19 at the Highline Ballroom :: New York, NY

$35 GA / $50 VIP Balcony / $65 VIP Floor. VIP tickets include reserved seating and an after show meet & greet with many of the musicians.

Concert starts @ 9PM
Doors open @ 8 PM
Tickets $35.00

SUBWAY UNDER BYZANTIUM by Maxine Gadd :: BOOK LAUNCH
Friday, February 29, 2008

Time: 8 PM
Location: Spartacus Books 319 W. Hastings St.
Contact: Carellin Brooks
Website: www.spartacusbooks.org/

Join New Star Books, the Kootenay School of Writing, and Spartacus Books for a reading and launch to celebrate the publication of Maxine Gadd's great new book SUBWAY UNDER BYZANTIUM.

Free admission! Refreshments available.

ex-Vancouver now NYC hip-hop producer Scott Harding was very badly hurt in a traffic accident recently. Like many self-employed people in the US he had no medical insurance & he is going to need a LOT of financial help, which can be sent to

The Scotty Hard Trust
c/o Heesok Chang
970 Kent Ave #401
brooklyn ny 11205


much more info from his Jazzmanian Devils partner at Condensed Milt

today's YouTube - P.P. Arnold--The First Cut Is The Deepest (rare)

a version with better sound

Cat Stevens' original

Keith Hampshire's Canadian version

trees from the "Wilderness" series Paul Raphaelson

via

farewell Teo Macero, producer & one of Miles Davis' most effective collaborators. It's sad that the release of all the unedited sessions from which he sculpted such classics as "in a Silent Way" & "On the Corner" upset him, for they vindicate his taste & acumen at every turn...

Local trees

via Zoilus--What do real thugs think of "The Wire"? (spoilers)

more June Christy YouTube - Imagination

All God's Children Got Rhythm

Takin' a Chance on Love

with Nat King Cole & Mel Torme - How High The Moon

I wish I could go live in these album covers...

mention of Miss Christy in an essay on California Cool in the new Atlantic:-

"Similarly, what the critic Whitney Balliet called the “pervasive suavity” of West Coast jazz—an understated and cleanly articulated playing that stayed close to the melody, tempered improvisation with control, and shunned blatant virtuosity—developed in response to the raw expression, the ostentatious and athletic displays (along with squawks and jagged accents) that characterized the increasing excesses of bop and hard bop, the dominant jazz styles back east. Cool jazz, especially its vocalists, injected the music with nonchalance and a sense of irony—qualities wholly absent from the jazz mainstream. The L.A.–based singers June Christy (the well-scrubbed former canary of the Stan Kenton Orchestra, the only great Los Angeles big band), Peggy Lee (onstage, she didn’t emote; she arched an eyebrow), and Frank Sinatra (especially on his up-tempo numbers, which convey the sense that romance is a lovely, transitory lark), all of whom recorded for Los Angeles’s trend-setting Capitol Records, interpreted lyrics with a resigned intelligence and a refined detachment. Listen to Christy’s signature “Something Cool,” about a tawdry lounge pickup, told from the perspective of the self-deluded female barfly: such knowing­ness entirely eluded the fervent (and earnest) Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and Nina Simone..."

Ediciones Eloísa Cartonera Book Covers

"Following Argentina's economic collapse in late 2001, the Eloisa Cartonera company arose from the ruins in Almagro, a lower middle-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires. In a broken-down shop on Guardia Street, young writers and artists have established an art gallery and bookshop that serves as the public face of Eloisa Cartonera, a publishing house that makes original books from recycled cardboard and cheap prints and sells them for less than 5 pesos ($1.60) each, about a third the price of a conventional paperback. The book covers are printed with rough stencils and poster paints..."

via gmtPlus9 (-15)

Singin' & Swingin': Jeri Southern: Coffee, Cigarettes & Memories (1958)

another gem from a great blog!

free Hawaii Five-O Season One

not available in Canuckistan...

"Let The Buyer Beware (2004)
7-1/2 Hours Of Mostly Unreleased Lenny":

last night's Lunar Eclipse over Green Lake on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

via the lively Slog

via Ron--Proof of poet's date with Destiny revealed

"In an unpublished draft of his book, Lucky Poet, the communist and Scottish nationalist wrote: "I had travelled down from Edinburgh to London specially to try to remove the Scone Stone from under the Coronation chair in Westminster Abbey, believing that once brought up over the border again, the Scottish people would refuse to allow it ever to go back to England and that the inevitable controversy might well set the whole Scottish movement alight at last.

"My friends and I unfortunately on close inspection found the removal of the Stone at that time impracticable..."

June Christy: Something Cool - Stereo Version (1960) a great favorite, long MIA &

the furthest thing from Squaresville, actually...don't miss this...