Suuu-perb Tuesday

Impressive.

An interesting aspect of the results is the disparity in "big" victories, i.e., states won with 60% or more of the popular vote:

OBAMA:
Alaska - 75%
Colorado - 67%
Georgia - 66%
Idaho - 80%
Illinois - 64%
Kansas - 74%
Minnesota - 67%
North Dakota - 61%

CLINTON:
Arkansas - 69%

One of the better summaries:

As with every campaign, we have to deal with the reality of where things stand today. But, sometimes it does help to take a step back. Obama was practically unknown as a serious contender a year ago. He was running against the vaunted, inevitable Clinton machine. Last year, it was the conventional wisdom, we all agreed, that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee and the race would be wrapped up on Super Tuesday. That didn't happen. Her aura of invincibility is gone. Her inevitability is gone.

Much left to do.

Can We?

the numbers are looking good



tune in
and/or chip in

& stay tuned

Scheer on Clinton

Robert Scheer nicely summarizes the Problems With Hillary:

Her supporters have accepted Clinton’s refusal to repudiate her vote to authorize the war, an ignominious moment she shares with other Democrats, including presidential candidate John Edwards, who at least has made a point of regretting it. It was a vote that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, 3,940 U.S. service members—five more on Monday—and a debt in the trillions of dollars that will prevent the funding of needed domestic programs that Clinton claims to support. And it doesn’t end with Iraq. Clinton has been equally hawkish toward Iran and, in a Margaret Thatcher-like moment, even attacked Obama for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons against Osama bin Laden. Clinton’s apologists include Gloria Steinem and too many other feminists, who should know better than to betray the women’s movement’s commitment to peace in favor of simplistic gender politics.

***

Hillary Clinton has made “experience” key to her claim to the presidency and tells us she will do the right thing from “day one.” The reality is that her extra four years in the U.S. Senate hardly provides better experience than Obama’s eight years in the Illinois state Senate battling for progress with the nation’s most hard-boiled politicians. And if she lays claim to her husband’s presidency, then she must also take responsibility for caving in to big media with the Telecommunications Act, selling out to the banks with the Financial Services Modernization Act, and killing the federal welfare program—a political gambit that deeply wounded millions of women and children. Her political career began with the Senate and she hit the ground running, but, as her craven support for Bush after 9/11 shows, it was in the wrong direction.

Taibbi Time

Not the first time Matt Taibbi has made the Nixon-Hillary connection. Now he elaborates:

What people forget about Clinton is that she is basically a Republican at heart. She campaigned for Barry Goldwater once upon a time and even canvassed poor neighborhoods in Chicago looking for "vote fraud" by Democrats. She was president of the College Republicans at Wellesley. In 1968, at the height of America's most intense cultural debate in a century, she only abandoned the Republican Party because it backed Dick Nixon instead of her favorite, Nelson Rockefeller.

Which is ironic, because as a presidential candidate herself, Hillary has basically run exactly Nixon's 1968 campaign. Her stump speech from the get-go was all about the "invisible Americans," a nearly word-for-word echo of Nixon's revolutionary "forgotten Americans" strategy of that year. Like Nixon, she was targeting a slice of the electorate that had chosen to stay on the sidelines during a cultural war and secretly yearned for someone in the political center to restore order; it's no accident that Hillary was on the opposite side of every issue that sent lefties to the streets in the Bush years, from the war to free trade to the Patriot Act.

Suuu-perb

We're #1! We're #1!

from the Financial Times:

US leads on deaths from treatable disease

More patients die in the US from diseases that could be treated by timely intervention than in any other leading industrialised country, a study by senior health academics showed on Monday. ....

"If the US performed as well as the top three countries in the study" - France, with 65 deaths per 100,000, and Japan and Australia, both with 71 per 100,000 - "there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year," the authors write in the journal Health Affairs.

via Jerome a Paris, who comments:

But Like Madeleine Albright said about the death of hundreds of thousands Iraqi kids in the 90s because of the sanctions regime, "it is worth it" - some principles are worth upholding even if it is tragically costly to do so. These hundred thousand Americans dying earlier than could have been each year (imagine: one million preventable deaths over the past decade!) are the front line soldiers in the fight for freedom and against socialism.

Thank God for them.

Ah yes, the dangers of "socialized medicine".

I guess if you haven't worked hard enough to get the right type of job with the right type of benefits, then you deserve to die.

see also here

Getting the word out, part 9.3

The Braxton Iridium box comes in at #38 in The Wire's best-of-2007 poll -- though if you eliminate non-improv titles, it'd be something like #3.

There is, however, another Braxton closer to the top of that list: Tyondai, via the (awesome) group Battles.

Getting the word out, part 9

The best-of lists have started to roll out, and these jazz journalists have chosen the Braxton Iridium 2006 box as one of the best new releases of the year:

• Stuart Broomer
• Rahsaan Clark Morris
• John Szwed

UPDATE: One more, via the Village Voice's 2007 Jazz Poll:

• Ted Panken

Getting the word out, part 8

Among Time Out Chicago's holiday box set picks:

9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006 (Firehouse 12)

Appease the snob in the family (Uncle Steve, come out from under your vinyl) with this loaded new work from avant-garde hero Anthony Braxton. Recorded live over four nights at Manhattan’s Iridium Jazz Club with Braxton’s sprawling 12(+1)tet, the nine-CD, one-DVD box presents a jaw-dropping display of discipline and wild imagination. Never mind that the Chicago expat and AACM pioneer commands a group bigger—and more coordinated—than this year’s Bears. It’s that the players, like Chicago’s own Nicole Mitchell (on flute), attack everything from serialism to minimalism to Albert Ayler–style preaching with the same feverish level of intensity. —Matthew Lurie

Barking Dogs & Deaf Lizards (for K.S.)

When a certain piece of music penetrates a person, a resonance is set in motion and an inner voice says: "I like this resonance. It elevates me. It develops hitherto unknown possibilities in me. I don't recognize myself. This is very interesting."

This place is terribly underdeveloped. It's a place of barking dogs and deaf lizards.

-- Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)

Damn You, Jeff Lorber!!

Even though the Braxton Iridium box failed to receive a Grammy nomination (no doubt due to the lack of a Best Ghost Trance Music Album category), the music-lover in your life would surely be thrilled to receive this 9-CD + DVD set as a gift this holiday season!

Pickle Promo - UPDATE

UPDATE #2: The benefit has been cancelled.

UPDATE #1: see this Chicago Journal article

DILL PICKLE FOOD CO-OP BENEFIT CONCERT & MEMBERSHIP DRIVE

Stargazing

Be THANKFUL, Chicagoans!

Turning Back the Clock

a sad anniversary:


"This one goes out to everybody who's still suffering in any way..."

World's Coolest Music Stand

Nowhere to walk, either

guess you just gotta stand there and dig the minimalist decor:

Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, 1965

I was gonna just give away my empty moving boxes, but now I'll have to reconsider...

Getting the word out, part 7.5

File this under "Lost in Translation", from Taylor:

Always some great lines from the internet translating devices, I like reading reviews about Taylor I have Bynum and Jessica Peacock, but I think this is my favorite line [translating Francesco Martinelli's review from the original Italian]:

The video, turned from Jason Guthartz, creator of situated restructures.net, has a quality housewife, but the information is and the assembly ago to arrive to the spectator.

I always thought Jason's documentary had a quality housewife!

On the contrary - my video is a promiscuous tramp!

Indeed, it can be yours for a very reasonable price (the holidays are coming, people).

Getting the word out, part 7

Francesco Martinelli in the September issue of Point of Departure:

The most recent example of Braxton's strategy is the stunning – in sheer size and quality – 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006 (Firehouse 12; reviewed in PoD Issue 11). Braxton has described this 9 CD + 1 DVD box set as the defining point in his career so far. Featuring recordings of Compositions Nos. 350 through 358, among the last in the Ghost Trance Musics series introduced over a decade ago, this is a landmark publication for several reasons. It documents an extended engagement on a New York Jazz Club stage, a rarity in itself; it features a 13-piece ensemble that can better represent the current state of strategies like the use of sectional leaders and constantly reconfiguring breakout groups to implement the mix of a composition’s primary pulse materials and the performance-specific array of secondary materials. A key element of the collection is the DVD, which includes a lecture by Braxton at Columbia University interspersed with video footage of the performances at Iridium. The lecture provides an instantaneous point of entry, as Braxton explains with great clarity and conviction the basic tenets of his music, and the snippets help identify the different characteristics of the compositions, vibrantly illustrating the composer's points in the talk. The lecture video's quality is home-made, but the important information is there and it comes through.

...Braxton creates his own system of references, his fascinating theory shifting the orchestral paradigms from idiomatic to melodies freely developed in time. But, what is amazing here is the power of the music, so rarely attained these days. No cautions or back-thinking, these musicians go for it, exploring the structures devised by the leader by finding their own ways to trace the landscape. Any open-eared listener cannot miss the inspiring variety of textures, rhythms and forms attained by the Braxtonized musicians.

Six-Stringin' & Bottom-Feedin'

Bootsy, Phelps and the Complete Strangers
"Fun In Your Thang pt. 1"
(1972, 7", Philmore Sound R-30135/6)
more info

Where are you now, Catfish Collins?

Oh. Here you are:

Being Hip, Bopping Hop (for M.R.)

1924-2007: