Christiern

I know what you mean. I once saw a local CBS reporter push a microphone into the face of a crying woman whose husband and 2 children had been found dead: "How do you feel?"

I tried to watch, a couple of times, but I have never been able to take Couric seriously, and her new role hasn't changed that. An entertainment show with a faux "free speech" feature (it has already been exposed as such)--I hope their ratings drop show this to have been a mistake. Well, network news is probably doomed and with baggage-laden Blitzer, CNN is anything but the "most trusted" news station. Jack Cafferty is a breath of fresh air on that stupid "situation room."

I use and am very satisfied with Griffin Technology's iMic. It is a simple, under $40 USB device that comes with good software. I understand that it also works with PCs, but I don't know about the software.

I am surprised to see that not even our Chicago-based members have mentioned Red Saunders.

"A night spot, particularly a rural one, where folks gathered to drink and dance, became known as a barrelhouse. The folk-blues of the the musicians who played these spots, particularly the piano players, is often referred to as Barrelhouse Piano. It is very rhythmic, percussive, and based on the blues." --Chris Siebert Siebert left out one important characteristic of the Barrelhouse piano style: volume. Because it was music performed in crowded, usually quite noisy joints, the pianist had to play in a loud, pounding way.

Francis has written much that I like, but this is one book I cannot take seriously.

And many more to come!

I also thought she was long gone. Her interpretation of Wagner's Der Ring Des Niebelungen remains memorable.

OP-ED COLUMNIST October 20, 2006 Incentives for the Dead By PAUL KRUGMAN I don’t know about you, but I need a break from political scandals. So let’s talk about private-sector scandals instead — specifically, the growing scandal involving backdated stock options, which this week led to the resignation of William McGuire, the chief executive of UnitedHealth Group. To understand the issue, we need to go back to the original ideological justification for giant executive paychecks. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, C.E.O.’s of the largest firms were paid, on average, about 40 times as much as the average worker. But executives wanted more — and professors at business schools provided a theory that justified much higher pay. They argued that a chief executive who expects to receive the same salary if his company is highly profitable that he will receive if it just muddles along won’t be willing to take risks and make hard decisions. “Corporate America,” declared an influential 1990 article by Michael Jensen of the Harvard Business School and Kevin Murphy of the University of Southern California, “pays its most important leaders like bureaucrats. Is it any wonder then that so many C.E.O.’s act like bureaucrats?” The claim, then, was that executives had to be given more of a stake in their companies’ success. And so corporate boards began giving C.E.O.’s lots of stock options — the right to purchase a share of the company’s stocks at a fixed price, usually the market price on the day the option was issued. If the stock went up, these options would pay off; if the stock went down, they would lose their value. And so, the theory went, executives would have the incentive to do whatever it took to push the stock price up. In the 1990’s, executive stock options proliferated — and executive pay soared, rising to 367 times the average worker’s pay by the early years of this decade. But the truth was that in many — perhaps most — cases, executive pay still had little to do with performance. For one thing, the great bull market of the 1990’s meant that even companies that didn’t do especially well saw their stock prices rise. Then there were the tricks that companies used to ensure lavish executive pay even if the stock simply seesawed up and down. For example, after a downward move in the stock price, executive stock options would often be repriced or swapped — that is, the price at which the executive had the right to buy stocks would be reduced to the new market price. Heads the C.E.O. wins, tails he gets another chance to flip the coin. What the backdating scandal reveals is that for many executives even that wasn’t enough. To ensure that executives profited from newly issued options, companies would pretend that the options had in fact been issued at an earlier date, when the stock price was lower. Thus a contract that Mr. McGuire signed in December 1999 included a grant of one million stock options dated back to Oct. 13, the day UnitedHealth’s stock price reached its low point for the year. What’s wrong with backdating stock options? There’s a tax evasion aspect, but the main point is the bait-and-switch. The public was told that gigantic executive paychecks were rewards for exceptional performance, but in practice executives were lavishly paid simply for showing up at the office. And in some cases even that wasn’t required. Cablevision Systems gave options to a deceased executive (in other words, to his heirs), backdating them to make it appear that he had received them while still alive. The moral of the story is that we still haven’t come to grips with the epidemic of corporate misgovernance revealed four years ago by the Enron and WorldCom scandals, then drowned out as a political issue by the clamor for war with Iraq. Even now, we’re still learning how deep the rot went. And there’s no reason to believe that the problem has been solved. Three years ago, Warren Buffett declared that reining in runaway executive pay was the “acid test of corporate reform.” Well, executive compensation, which fell briefly after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, has shot right back up. So we’re still waiting for serious corporate reform. And don’t tell me that everything must be O.K. because stocks have been rising lately. Remember, they rose even faster in the 1990’s — and the 1920’s.

It would be nice if you would label this so we'd know which one is you. The old guy.

Thank you, everybody--I am overwhelmed and grateful to be a part of the Big O's jazz community! I had a very nice time this evening when friends of mine got together and took me out to dinner (one flew in from Köln). I learned a lot from my grandfather, who spent a lifetime making friends and, as a consequence, never had a lonely moment when he and my grandmother reach their 90s. I am very fortunate to have so many genuine friends and I hope that I am contributing to their lives at least a good fraction of what I get from knowing them. Here is a fleeeting second of the evening captured for posterity.

This will take you there.

At last, a parish where altar boys can feel safe!

Thanks, Spontooneous. I think my favorite title is one I saw in the late 1950s or early '60s: Songs for People who have $2.99 This was a period when titles like: Music For People Who Hate Music Music For Ironing Dinner Music for People who Aren't Hungry I rather like the last one, actually

I just took a look down there at the thread treading. Thanks, BW, the barf bag came in handy. It seems to have come down to the troll, who has a high school crush on Wynton, the babbling Bush biker, and the main contrarian, who reads race into everything and appears to have edged ahead of the rainy Oaklander in that department. They all deserve each other and the web dominatrix deserves them all.

I don't think so, Dan.

Still going, last I checked (last week), and Lois continues to post any positive review she can find. Her posts are not numerous, I might add. Joel, I understand where you'ew coming from--sure beats third-party-triggered negativity.

Meaning? That Stanley can be pleasant is not new to most of us who have known him, so his turning on the charm is not a revelation. Ergo, your post does not shed new light on him (at least not to people who have observed him at close range). It does, however reveals how readily you were fooled by his PR facade (a veneer beyond which Allen and I can see) and how you seem able to not factor in Stanley's odious, disingenuous persona, opportunistic behavior, and total lack of journalistic integrity. All the charm in the world cannot obscure that, IMO. I do, however, admire your positive view of things (as you have demonstrated on previous occasions)--rather than listen to us, you should make your own discoveries, but--re Stanley--the sheer volume of negative views should tell you something. Re-read the never-ending Crouch thread on JC (I think they are past or close to the 2000 mark) and you will see that Lois' desperate attempts to paint a positive picture of her celeb du jour are taken seriously only by the resident Wynton-mesmerized troll and those who consistently allow race to plow their path. BTW, Allen's post bears repeating: well, we're not prejudging him - just basing our comments on our experiences with him, his intellectual dishonesty, his written attacks on people lilke Anthony Davis (whom he thinks isn't black enough because his music comes out of a tradition that Stanley sees as too Euroo), the fact that he physically attacked one guy and has threatened others (like Gene Santoro) - look, Stanely can be quite charming, and I've spent some time with him. He's also a bright guy, but he aint no genius, and his prose is not only tortured but unintentionally humorous in its badly executed slang-ese. And the way he and Wynton have made a fetish of "the blues" is particualry repulsive - I will quote a letter that I wrote to the NY Times a few years ago and that was published in the Arts and Leisure section: To the Editor: While I am second to none in my admiration for Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, I am becoming increasingly weary of Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch's politicization of the blues. In their hands (as with their fellow Lincoln Center advisor Albert Murray) the blues has become something of an ideology, a club with which to beat all who do not share their aesthetic leanings. Last year, Mr. Marsalis told us what a blues-dependent art Ellington's was [''Ellington at 100: Reveling in Life's Majesty,'' Jan. 17, 1999], when in truth Duke used the blues so effectively because he was not dependent on them, but rather came to them, in terms of class and background, as something of an outsider. Now Stanley Crouch comes to tell us that Armstrong ''figured out how to articulate the sound of the blues through Tin Pan Alley tunes without abandoning their harmonic underpinnings,'' and quotes Mr. Marsalis as saying that ''not even Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Monk and Coltrane did anything that sophisticated'' [''Wherever He Went, Joy Was Sure to Follow,'' March 12]. Once again, this is a case of fitting facts to ideology. Armstrong was truly a great blues player, but what he did most effectively was to expand the expressive possibilities of jazz in a way that made the blues only one element of many, in a manner that actually reduced their relative importance. Certainly Armstrong continued to play with the kind of tonal and rhythmic nuances that reflected the powerful dominance of the African-American performance tradition, but these were not necessarily related strictly to the blues. They reflected the larger picture of African-American performance styles. And Monk, Coltrane and, indeed, Charlie Parker devised musical systems that were every bit as sophisticated as Armstrong's. ALLEN LOWE South Portland, Me.

I think your post may say more about you than it does about Stanley.

In one word: opportunism. Stanley wasn't getting anywhere on the so-called avant garde scene, so he grabbed the first promising coattail that came his way---and rode Wynton into the spotlight.

Very Interesting. Thanks for posting these links, Conrad.

This could become a craze...

The original LPs were severely criticized for having poor sound quality. I don't know if Norman was cutting cost , if he simply didn't care, or if his ears were bad. Jazz, in general, was not treated as well in the audio dept. as classical. Vanguard more or less led the way to improved jazz sound quality. Manfred Eicher took it further with ECM--the audio, that is.

Marcello, I fully understand why Lorraine Gillespie didn't welcome Babs as a visitor--he could be (and often was) a bit too much. Horny, my copy is a Lancer Book, also published in 1967. My other book has dedications to his mother, Lottie Brown, and Josephine Baker, who died two days apart whilst the book was in its last stages. The publication year is 1975 and, as you can see below, there was no typesetting involved, just typewritten pages, with corrections.

Babs only played sax with an "e"