Taibbi on "McCain Resurrected"

a new classic on the "wounded, crusading Ahab"

and something new from Robert Greenwald:

AGS @ HPAC

come on down:

TalkingPoint: Anti Gravity Surprise

6pm Monday, March 3rd at the Hyde Park Art Center
5020 S. Cornell Avenue
Muller Meeting Room
http://www.hydeparkart.org

TalkingPoint is a free monthly Monday evening series in which Chicago-based cultural producers share their ideas as a starting point for conversation in an intimate setting.

Since 2001, public art group Anti Gravity Surprise has addressed the concept of world peace in 9/11-themed multimedia project Gathering Motion; mounted a full eight-hour day of art and discussion about work with Second Shift; and hosted $election community art events to engage voters.

Co-founders Kathleen Duffy and Jennifer Karmin will speak about their collaborative approach and ongoing work Tell Us What You Think, an evolving public art project that will be distributed as a free workbook.

http://www.antigravitysurprise.org

Come down to the Hyde Park Art Center for a chance to listen, discuss, and learn. Food and drink provided.

The Sound of Fresh Chicken (for T.M.)

Miles on the August 1969 Bitches Brew sessions:

I had told Teo Macero, who was producing the record, to just let the tapes run and get everything we played, told him to get everything and not to be coming in interrupting, asking questions. "Just stay in the booth and worry about getting down the sound," is what I told him. And he did, didn't fuck with us once and got down everything, got it down real good.

p.s.:

"You got to get the chicken... you ain't gettin' the chicken."
-- Miles Davis to Lenny White, during the 1969 Bitches Brew sessions

"Bitches Brew is not a frozen chicken."
-- Wayne Shorter, 1999

UPDATE:

Phoneathon '08

Phoneathon '08 starts tonight: Call 847-491-WNUR and show your appreciation for quality noncommercial radio.

There are lots of great Jazz Show premiums, including the autographed Braxton Iridium box shown above.

(If you want a T-shirt to complement the box, you might ask if they still have any shirts left from 2000.)

Hillary the Hypocrite

let the flip-flopping begin:

Mrs. Clinton’s aides said the delegates should make their decision based on who they thought would be the stronger candidate and president. Mr. Obama argues that they should follow the will of the Democratic Party as expressed in the primary and caucuses — meaning the candidate with the most delegates from the voting.

more flopping:

Hillary Clinton will take the Democratic nomination even if she does not win the popular vote, but persuades enough superdelegates to vote for her at the convention, her campaign advisers say.

The New York senator, who lost three primaries Tuesday night, now lags slightly behind her rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, in the delegate count. She is even further behind in "pledged'' delegates, those assigned by virtue of primaries and caucuses.

But Clinton will not concede the race to Obama if he wins a greater number of pledged delegates by the end of the primary season, and will count on the 796 elected officials and party bigwigs to put her over the top, if necessary, said Clinton's communications director, Howard Wolfson.

Hillary on "the Will of the People"

my first DKos diary:

If Obama ends up with more pledged delegates when all the primary/caucus votes are counted (incl. any possible do-over of Florida & Michigan), will Clinton respect the will of the people and concede, or will she allow superdelegates to hand her the nomination?

Sen. Clinton should remember her own comments from 2000:

"I have thought about this for a long time," Mrs. Clinton said at a rally in an airport hangar in Syracuse. "I've always thought we had outlived the need for an Electoral College, and now that I am going to the Senate, I am going to try to do what I can to make clear that the popular vote, the will of the people, should be followed."
***
She said she wanted "to be on the side of the democratic process working," and so would support the effort to establish direct presidential elections.
***
"I believe strongly that in a democracy we should respect the will of the people."

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..."