Hope for the future?

As a jazz fan, I often worry about whether the genre will die out. That's why I'm always happy to stumble across "youngsters" with obvious talent and dedication carrying on the tradition. Check out Melody Gardot, 22 years old. (Just let it roll after you click on the link). She is for real, but what I really like are the musicians behind her. They are obvious jazz-heads who, along with her, will carry on. It may not be Ella, Nina, or Nancy, but it sure as hell beats Brittney!

Oh, and then after you listen to a couple of her tracks, check out her bio. It's an amazing, uplifting story. Please check it out.

Ciao,

tom

Reality brings incredible saddness

As readers of this blog are well aware, I am a fervent supporter of Barack Obama. I truly believe that unlike anyone else in the picture, he is a unique figure at this time in our history, who would bring healing, pride and even joy back to our nation. I viewed all the recent attacks on him as acceptable, though often loathsome, because his weathering them showed his viability.

But today, I find this in Dana Milbank's column in the Washington Post (and I found many other articles of similar tenor). I hope beyond hope that I am wrong, but I am coming to believe that the Rev. Wright has become a pair of cement shoes for Barack. Why can't the guy just shut up until after the election? I'd like to say things like, "Well the American people will sort this all out and end up voting for Obama," but I'm not able to now. These latest Wright comments (including a coy aside implying that Barack's criticisms of him are disingenuous), are going to be amplified and repeated again and again by Republican smear merchants in general election, with fatal results.

Please tell me I'm wrong! I'm totally depressed to the point at which I'm actually thinking it might be best after all for Hillary to be our candidate. The next four years of Supreme Court nominations is THE most important issue in the next elections, bar none -- trust me on this. Accordingly, it is absolutely imperative, ABSOLUTELY, that John McCain NOT become president. If Obama is going to lose because of this Wright shit sitting on top of all the other stuff, then maybe Hillary could win, in view of her already-vetted past, along with her bare-knuckles approach. Again, I need some bucking up here folks -- tell me that Barack is going to be my next President. His first Supreme Court pick: Hillary Clinton.

Bloody but not bowed,

Tom

Fun, fun...

Hey, if you just want to smile a little and bring some cheer, try this.

Be sure to check out the caricature gallery.

Hillary's amazing past?!

I have been fuming over the Sean Hannity via Stephanopoulos' question to Obama in the last debate regarding his supposed connections with Bill Ayers, which the Hillary camp is now perpetuating. Tom Hayden, citing his wife's current revulsion over Hillary, writes an eye-opening article on this subject. Geez, my jaw was literally dropping over the facts that he presents. Not that I condemn Hilliary's connections, but the sheer hypocrisy of her current stance is appalling.

Here is a salient excerpt:

To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, "Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?"

She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

Check it out the entire article -- it's worth the read.

By the way, I knew Bob Treuhaft in the mid-seventies when I was still practicing criminal law in the S.F. Bay area. He was a sweet, but totally committed guy. And - a fact I'll bet you did not know - he was married to Jessica Mitford.

~ tom

Maureen says it so well...

I love Mo Dowd! She has the rare ability to present logical, well-reasoned substantive positions and yet still make her comments devilishly humorous, if not outright hilarious. Her post-Penn. primary autopsy is outright Hillary-arious, but it's also so, so right on. Enjoy.

~ tom

P.S. I had to run to my dictionary re: "Brobdingnagian" Here's the definition:

Brobdingnagian \brob-ding-NAG-ee-uhn\, adjective:
Of extraordinary size; gigantic; enormous.

Poets laureate

I am definitely a California guy, and especially grateful to live 500 feet from the Bay. We may be wine-drinking, cheese-nibbling effete snobs, but to our credit we love our poets.

~ tom

Edward Hoagland

I don't read as much as I should, and one of the literary formats I tend to ignore is the essay. I'm up at our place at Tahoe this weekend, and I happened to notice that I had one of my favorite essay collections up here: "Tiges & Ice -- Reflections of Nature and Life" by Edward Hoagland.

All the the essays are worthy reads. One of my favorites, which I just reread with pleasure, is "Running Mates" dealing with the subject of friendship. Here is a wonderful excerpt from that essay:

Friendship can be exploitive and predatory, a strange symbiosis of quiet underwater carnage, though I've seldom seen one stay that way. Yet friends are partly for quarreling with. Most of us need to squabble occasionally in order to tap off our toxins, and friends permit us to without inflammatory consequences. We can be a trifle mean, or stumble into a brief tailspin, and be forgiven. Knowing our knotty nuttiness, our self-destructive lonely spells, they let us phone a bit too much and don't require us to specify just how tricky we feel. Friends are for jitters as well as barbecues.

Some other Hoagland quotes on a cool site I had not seen before.



All the best,

~ tom

I'd rather be bitter than racist...

Obama tells the truth inartfully concerning the "bitterness" of small-town America and gets crucified.

Ed Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania, actually says that many of his constituents in Pennsylvania will not vote for Barack because he is black! Nothing happens to him! Why is he not the reverend Wright of the Hillary campaign? I just don't get this -- uh, I just got it: Racism remains acceptable in this country.

People, THINK about this! The fricking GOVERNOR of a big state says that many people will not vote for a brilliant, sincere man simply because he is HALF black ... [Uh, er, what about his white half?!]. That is disgusting.

OK, how about my own personal poll, directed to registered Democrat, Joe Six Pack in Penn:

Question 1: Barack Obama has said {insert "bitter" comment by Barack}. Will this comment cause you to not support Obama?

Question 2: Your Governor, Ed Rendell, says that a significant number of his constituents will not vote for Obama because he is African-American. Are you among those constituents?

My predictions:

Question 1: Yes: 50%; no: 50% (And that is giving Joe Six Packs the credit they deserve; I've heard a lot of them on talk shows, and in blogs saying "I'm bitter and Hillary is full of shit for trying to say that "I'm proud" of being a loser in this f***ed up system." )

Question 2: Yes: 1%; no 99%.

The point here is that if my poll results are correct, Rendell should be pounded far more than Obama. After all, the "voters" should be up in arms and INSULTED by Rendell characterizing them as racists. Why does Rendell get a ride? See the following...

But of course we all know that the answers of the people polled to Question 2 will probably be mostly lies. (See anything about the "Tom Bradley effect" in the California governor's election in the 80's. The polls said Tom would win by double digits and he lost. The post-election autopsy revealed that a huge number of the people polled lied when they said they would vote for Tom. They were inherently racist and did not want to admit it directly or in their own minds).

What this all means to me is that Obama is the only politician in my lifetime who has the courage and conviction to actually raise honest, troublesome issues, give his own views, and then genuinely request and respect the views of America as to what they believe.

T.

The Good Old Days?

One of the smartest, coolest guys I ever knew was my late father. He was with us at least 20 years more than he would have been in the "good old days," thanks to a couple of by-pass surgeries. In fact after the first one, he coined the phrase, "the good old days were not that good."

Just watching the recent media retrospective on the 40th anniversary of the King assasination, proves Dad's prophetic words. Every time I see all that media footage, I am stunned over how just a few decades ago, blacks could not use the same restrooms or drinking fountains as whites or sit in the front of the bus, etc. Were those the good old days? Hell no.

And on the medical front, I've already mentioned Dad's "borrowed days" as he called them. But thanks to medical science, I still have the joy of my wife, Eileen. Her privacy is important, so suffice it to say that if she had faced 40 years ago what she faced only a few years ago, she would not be here with me now. Needless to say, the good old days are not that appealing to us!

I could go on and on... But in closing, in my mind, the best argument against the good old days is the advance in computers and the Internet. The change in our lives as a result of them is literally amazing. Every time I see a "not-that-old" movie like "All the President's Men" and see NO COMPUTERS, and people typing on IBM Selectric typewriters (remember how cool we all thought those were), I am so grateful for modern word processing. (I remember projects I had to submit in law school [1966-1969] using correction tape, and carbon copies, which were so unforgiving and time consuming that one's creative juices were regrettably, but inevitably, stunted.)

The impetus for this post came from reading a great post from Micheal Lally in his blog today. He hits the nail right on the head. It's so cool that a prospective techno Luddite has evolved into a top-notch blogger who now routinely uses all the power and magic of the ether!

Ain't it cool?

T.

Terri Lyne Carrington

Some years ago at the Monterey Jazz Festival I heard Terri Lyne Carrington for the first time, playing trap drum-set with Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson and other greats. They were all fabulous, but Terri was the salt the made the stew so fabulous. Like all great drummers, she was more interested in holding things together and advancing the "moment" (be it kicking ass, or mellowing out) than showing her prodigious technical chops. I have been hoping to see her live again, but no luck so far.

Anyway, I was thinking about her for some reason today, so I Googled her. Among other things, this came up: A perfect example of how selfless Terri is -- this is her group after all, and she could have given us a bunch of technical bombastic shit, but no, she just glues this all together. Hendrix would have loved it!

If you want to learn more about Terri check out her site

Oh, and just in case you hard-line jazz fans (I'm one too) aren't impressed by the Jimi Hendrix cover above, listen to Terri with Stan Getz. The opening solo is impressive, and I love her trading eights with the bass man and Stan at the end, and then riffing that final 8 with Stan at the very end.

As you can see, she plays with the "big boys and girls." Plus, you can fall in love with her for her looks and aloof charisma.

Five out of five stars for Terri...

TW

Obama gaining in Pennsylvania

Holy cow! Obama is gaining significant ground in the PA primary.

I still don't think he can win it outright, but if this poll holds true or gets even better, Hillary will not gain that many delegates, and she won't really make much of a dent in the aggregate popular vote.

Of course, if he were to win it outright, that will be the end of Hillary...