Alexander

Great selection. Apart from some obvious choices (Patton, Jefferson, Spivey, Hunter) I noticed Dock Boggs and the Carolina Tar Heels in there. Great stuff!

One of my favorite live theatre experiences was an evening of one-acts titled "Beckett-Pinter-Mamet." A wonderful evening with one act plays by each author. He will be missed...

The Tower in Austin had a whole ROOM devoted to jazz (& classical I believe, my memory is getting rusty). Those were the golden days, and we didn't even know it. Oh, I think we DID know it. On the first floor, Tower on Picadilly Circus had a whole Jazz room (with a tiny bit of World music at one end). MG The Tower in Boston not only had a jazz room, they had a whole (smaller) room devoted to world music!

Not exactly an album cover (although used on a few of their albums), Hartman also designed the logo for Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

Another Phil Hartman cover!

He's not exactly famous for being an artist, but this cover was designed by Phil Hartman!

I Was Under The Impression That Everyone Loved My Headlocks!

Agree. I really miss the days when Tower was really, really good. They even had a whole aisle devoted to jazz. This was at least 10 years ago of course. I miss the Tower on the corner of Newbury and Mass Ave in Boston. They had not only a jazz aisle, but a whole separate jazz DEPARTMENT. I bought my very first jazz album there ("My Favorite Things" on cassette!) in 1992. Sigh. I just remember how overwhelming it all seemed. A whole room of music I'd never heard before. It was terrifying and wonderful at the same time. After it closed it became a VERY substandard Virgin Megastore and then a Best Buy. I didn't appreciate how good I had it! The 90s were really a great time for music retail!

Yeah, I picked up some good stuff when I visited the Virgin Mega Store at Walt Disney World in Florida. I remember being pleasantly surprised. I also remember looking in the reggae section and seeing a HUGE display of every single Trojan box!

I love the little Zappa I have and I'm always looking to get more. Here's what I have: Freak Out! We're Only In It for The Money Hot Rats Waka Jawaka Over-Nite Sensation Sheik Yerbouti Joe's Garage So what should I get next? What do folks recommend?

Just to bring this up in regards to Wyton's "hip-hop is the new minstrelsy": I've been reading and listening to a lot of stuff lately regard blackface and it seems to me that one of the most enduring images was of the grinning, perpetually happy and deferential "darkey." It seems to me that if hip-hop is coming from anyplace, it's coming from the same angry rejection of that image that people like Miles and LeRoi Jones (among many others) were doing. I mean, the image of the threatening "angry black male" is certainly not one that was seen on the minstrel stage. Sure, blacks were depicted as gambling, drinking, and carrying razors, but there was no sense of a threat. Not to say that whites didn't harbor anxieties about slave uprisings and later of race riots, just that those tropes were not dealt with in minstrelsy.

"I heard the voice of the porkchop say 'Come unto me and rest!'"

Funny how when I last posted in this (brief) thread, I was a student. Now here I am, four years later, with my degree and certifications and everything and I don't have a fershlugginer job! Not that I haven't taught. I have. My first job was teaching English to tenth graders. I made a LOT of mistakes at that first job (as most teachers do at their first teaching jobs). Three out of my four sections were great and things went well (I still made mistakes, but they weren't disasterous). The fourth was hell. I totally screwed up the first day of class and that was IT for the rest of the semester. I lost them then and there and I never got them back. It got so bad in that one class that I was "asked to resign" at the end of the first semenster which I gladly did (for my own sanity and because conditions in that class were such that these kids just weren't learning). I spent quite a bit of time subbing after that and generally working on my skills. One skill you can hone during subbing is making those important "first day" connections with students. I was very successful as a sub and it has really helped me in subsequent jobs. My area, btw, is very competitive when it comes to jobs (there are at least five teaching colleges around here which keep pooping out more new teachers each year). It was so hard to find a job that I had to work as a TA for a few months. It was a good experience, though. I worked in a Special Ed classroom as a one-to-one with a kid with severe behavior issues. Having me around seemed to be good for this kid. He really turned around while I was there. When I arrived, his tantrums (he was in Middle School) were so violent that he had put his previous one-to-one on disability. And here I was not even trained in restraint (which means I couldn't even legally touch him to defend myself). So I had to learn how to talk him down. I learned a lot about teaching students with disabilities while in that classroom. I also learned a lot about myself (for example, I learned that I can sit calmly in the middle of a room while a student literally tears that room apart). The classroom teacher I TA'ed with really enjoyed having a second certified teacher in the room. I could take over for her if she had to leave with a difficult student and I often subbed for her when she was absent. I also taught my one-to-one charge English and Social Studies (he was on a different academic track from the rest of the class in those two subjects) since those are my areas of certification. After that I wound up teaching GED prep in Schenectady, NY. In the morning, I taught 16 to 18 year olds. The classes were very small (most days I had about five kids, if I was lucky) and I taught all subjects. We had literally no materials to work from. In the afternoon, I went to the Schenectady County Correctional Facilty and taught the female inmates there. I had a great experience and actually met some really interesting people. Sadly, it was a grant funded program and they didn't get their grant for this year, I was downsized. I'm still looking (I'm on unemployment for the time being). Just had an interview for a long-term sub position yesterday. I sent out seven resumes just today (I'm starting to look outside my area. It would kill me if I had to leave my daughter for any length of time, but I've got to work!).

REALLY looking forward to this, Allen...

Man, that must have been a rough day to be Vaughn Meader... "Aw, fuck! I'm unemployed!"

I never got on the "Bettie Bandwagon" back in the '90s when her pin-ups were suddenly so hot again. She was certainly a lovely woman and there was something kind funny about a woman with such "girl next door" looks doing these odd bondage pictures, but I never got into it. Sad to hear that she's passed away, however.

I was a few weeks short of my tenth birthday and was already a die-hard Beatles fan. My mom tells me that I could sing Beatles songs before I could talk. I can still remember that morning vividly. My clock radio went off and I heard the DJ say, "John Lennon was shot and killed last night." I remember thinking that I must still be dreaming. I went into the kitchen to ask my mom if I heard what I thought I heard...and I found her in tears. It was devistating for me. John Lennon was one of my childhood heroes and he was gunned down in the street by a madman.

Stay up later than everyone else and use headphones. Works for me.

I'm good on most instruments, including steel drums, harmonicas, accordians, and bagpipes (I LOVE me some good bagpipes). My only real dealbreaker is that tinny early-80s Casio keyboard sound.

Even more important, in my view, is simply growing up with BOOKS. My house growing up was filled with books. I knew that my dad was a reader and that made reading important to me. Today, my daughter loves reading. She reads a lot on her own (particularly things about pirates, which is her current favorite subject. I can't wait until she's old enough to take on "Treasure Island"). She and I read together all the time. I also think - apropos of your Poe comment - that it's actually a good thing to try to go beyond your reading level as a kid. I remember reading "The Odyssey" in sixth grade for a book report. I understood very little, but I'm glad I tried it! And what I did understand, I loved!

I LOVE Stereo Jack's! I miss it so much!

I went through a big Auster period in my early twenties. I think the first book of his that I read was either "The Music of Chance" or "The New York Trilogy." I got very into him, even opting to write my (aborted) Master's Thesis on his work (it was to be titled "Private "I"s and Missing Persons: Issues of Identity in the the 'New York Trilogy'"). The Master's Thesis was really doomed from the start because nobody on the faculity at my grad school had ever read Auster, so they sent me to the one professor who dealt with modern authors. He'd never read Auster either, but he agreed to advise me. After reading the "New York Trilogy," he called me into his office and said, "You're joking, right? You're not really writing about this pretentous clown, are you?" That didn't kill my thesis, but it certainly didn't help. What killed my thesis was the day my advisor called me into his office and told me that I "write like a damn newspaperman" (another grad school professor called me a "restfully clear writer," which means pretty much the same thing, but is more tactful). I've since come to pretty much the same conclusion as my old professor, actually. I still enjoy Auster's work, but some of his more "writerly" turns make me cringe. It's like reading a teenager who's read a lot of Kafka.

The only decent record store in my area is Last Vestige. I would desperately like to own my own record store, but opening one would be an excercise in futility! Nevertheless, there's a great location in Schenectady, NY...

As a small child, my three favorite books were "The Moon Man" by Tomi Ungerer, "The Island of the Skog" by Steven Kellogg, and anything at all by Maurice Sendak (if I had to pick, I would probably choose "In The Night Kitchen," which indrectly led me later in life to the work of Windsor McCay). When I got a little older, I got a library card, which was probably the single greatest acquisition of my childhood. My dad introduced me to "The Hobbit" and later to "The Lord of the Rings" books. From the library, I got a lot of books on folklore and mythology. I was particularly interested in anything having to do with vampires and werewolves. I can still tell you the best traditional ways to stave off a vampire attacks (which I have shared with my daughter, who lives by them, despite my assurances that there's no such thing as vampires). I also liked books on ghosts. I was actually strangely attracted to horror for a fearful child. Somewhere in elementary school, I discovered Edgar Allen Poe and quickly devoured everything I could find by him. I also enjoyed reading Washington Irving and Charles Dickens. In the eighth grade, I got heavily into comic books (I wouldn't say that I had "discovered" them at that point, since I'd been reading my dad's Marvel comics since I was a toddler, but this is the point where I started buying them for myself) and stopped reading everything else for about two years. The last book I read before this dry spell was "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle (I had seen the movie). In tenth grade I became friends with a guy who was a heavy reader (he was also into comics, but he was at that time a big Dickens fan), which got me back into reading books. The first book I read following my fallow comic-book-only period was "Strange Wine," a collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison (I found that reading short stories was a good way to get back into longer forms). I went through a brief Stephen King period, getting his books out of the school library. I remember reading "Carrie," "The Shining," "The Stand," and a couple of others. I was just starting "Cujo" when I realized that everything King wrote was exactly the same, and I gave up on it. I read "Native Son" by Richard Wright and "Crime and Punishment" that summer and began to get into more "literary" fiction, which is still where my tastes run. These days I'm primarily into that and also history books and some "pop science" stuff.

In know that in large measure my outrage about this is fueled by the fact that I'm embittered about being an unemployed school teacher while one of my high school rivals is a millionare several times over, but I just thought I would note: Kevin Warsh, the youngest Governor on the board of the Federal Reserve System, comes from the same background as the author of this piece. He worked as a broker for Morgan Stanley for several years until he decided to use his government contacts (one of his old Poli Sci professors at Stanford had an "in" in the Bush administration. I believe her last name was "Rice") and go to work for the worst president in American history. When he was first appointed to the Board, there was some outrage in economic circles. Kevin (we went to high school together, you know, so I get to call him Kevin) went to Harvard Law School before he went to work at Morgan Stanley. He is not an economist with an academic background. In recent months, he has apparently turned into a big asset for the Fed, since he actually knows the people involved in the Wall Street crisis and has been central to negotiating the bailouts. That's right. My little Kevin is behind the bailouts. It is truly shocking, therefore, to read this article and realize just how little the folks who do the sort of work Kevin did know about business and the economy that they so casually play with. My wife has taken to blaming Kevin for everything that goes wrong. I think she may be right...