Christiern

I have both--check yor PM. Chris

This was also on tonights ABC News--iPod is indeed successful.--CA July 21, 2004 Duke to Provide Freshmen With iPods By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 9:01 a.m. ET DURHAM, N.C. (AP) -- Freshmen showing up at Duke University this year will get their own Apple iPod, part of an experiment by the school to see if the popular portable music player can double as a learning tool. In a first-of-its-kind deal for Apple Computer Inc., the university will distribute 1,650 iPods for the pilot program. Duke would not say how much it will pay for each 20-gigabyte iPod, but said it will receive a discount from the retail price of $299. The program fits into university plans to use more technology in teaching, said Tracy Futhey, Duke's vice president for information technology. Since its introduction in 2001, the iPod has taken off as the trendiest gadget for storing and playing digital music. IPods can store other kinds of data as well, and Duke students will receive models stocked with school-related information, including freshman orientation details, the academic calendar, campus tours and even the school's fight song. The university also will create a Web site modeled on the Apple iTunes online music site from which students can download songs and course content from faculty, including language lessons, lectures and audio books. Lisa Merschel's Spanish class will use the iPods to listen to textbook exercises and Spanish songs. Sally Schauman plans to have students record field interviews on the ethics and science of urban water conservation. The university will spend $500,000 on the project, which also includes hiring an extra technology specialist, giving grants to faculty, and studying the outcome. The program is a one-year experiment, but could be renewed. While it might sound like an extravagant gift for incoming students, Duke students pay a premium -- about $39,240 a year for tuition, fees, room and board. Schauman isn't worried that students will start listening to music in class. "If you're in a class so boring you need to do that, then I encourage you to do so,'' Schauman said. ``Or if your need to learn is so low, you shouldn't be here in the first place.''

Brownie's two glass plates solution can work. It is an old remedy from the 78rpm era. I would not use an oven, however, but I used to get good results in the sun--and if it works in the midnight sun, imagine how flat your discs will be in the D.C. noonday sun.

Your understanding needs revision. Here's a photo I took of Frank Strozier with Terence Blanchard and Ray Mantilla at the 1984 Umbria Festival in Perugia.

Mgraham, you are not being fair to Apple with the two links you provide. The following is the Apple site link you ought to have given us. Try this.

Sorry to report that he apparently passed away last night (July 19) of liver cancer.

No, Joe C, I was not aware of Craig's re-entry into the record business, but I just spoke to Joe who told me that the project is in its early stages. He is off to Finland tomorrow, to play at some sort of beach jazz festival, north of Helsinki. Sounds cold. I told Joe about James Williams' death, which came as a quite a shock to him--to many people, I think.

If jazz sales are on the rise, it may merely be due to the ever broadening application of that term. There is a lot of crap that passes for "jazz" these days.

When Apple lowers its price it has nothing to do with the product being "cool" or not. Apple traditionally lowers the price of a product when a new version is introduced--it is a way of clearing inventory, and coolness is not affected. The fact remains, that iPod is a huge success and no company has come up with a product to fully match it.

...and he will call himself John Litweiler.

Joe is probably the most famous obscure musician I know. His music may not always caress your ears, but it never fails to give you something to think about. I have been a fan (and friend) for about 40 years.

Considering the abundance of great Jewish American jazz artists, we should not be surprised to find the music well represented in Israel.

It was disturbing, but I'll wait for next week's episode before I decide that it was an gratuitous aside.

Thanks for pointing to this article, Larry. John Leonard is someone whom I have admired since we both were doing night shows on Pacifica station (he at KPFA, I at WBAI). He was known then as the "cabbage of the night," among other things--very inventive, very inspiring. This NY Times piece is interesting and Leonard's observations are solid, IMO. July 18, 2004 'Hatchet Jobs': Smash-Mouth Criticism By JOHN LEONARD Dale Peck: the critic as no more Mr. Nice Guy. HATCHET JOBS Writings on Contemporary Fiction. By Dale Peck. 228 pp. The New Press. $23.95. ALTHOUGH Robert Southey was the poet laureate of England from 1813 until his death in 1843, and a Lake District buddy of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he is hardly read at all today. A wisecrack by Richard Porson may have done some serious damage. About Southey's epic poems, Porson said, ''They will be read when Homer and Virgil are forgotten, but -- not till then.'' You will notice that I mosey. Some of us, when we are about to be unpleasant, are bothered by the feeling that it's almost as hard to write a bad book as a good one and lots easier to write a slash-and-burn review. So we walk around the block to suck up Randall Jarrell and perspective. Others, like Dale Peck, fall down out of the sky on the head of the pedestrian author like a piano or a safe. Peck is his own blunt instrument. Which is why, in ''Hatchet Jobs,'' his Newgate Calendar of maledictions, he leans on words with primary colors, like terrible, bloated, boring and gratuitous; hate, resent, stale and slather; maudlin, dreck, drivel and insipid; muddled, pretentious, derivative and bathetic -- not to mention scatologies that can't be reprinted here but brought no blush to the bum of The New Republic, where most of Peck's fatwas first appeared and where most of American literature is generally considered a waste of the editors' warped space and deep time. Peck is so hard on his elders that you suspect him of symbolic patricide, except that he is just as hard on his peers. Famously, of course, Rick Moody: ''the worst writer of his generation.'' But Colson Whitehead gets it for his ''stiff, schematic'' first novel, ''The Intuitionist,'' and a second, ''John Henry Days,'' with ''the doughy center of a half-baked cake.'' David Foster Wallace's ''Infinite Jest'' so much fails to amuse him that he wishes on Wallace an anal assault. Richard Powers, Dave Eggers and the Jonathans, Franzen and Lethem, are rudely dismissed for lack of ''a true empathetic undercurrent'' and what he elsewhere disdains as ''pomo shenanigans.'' Nor is he impressed by the Dirty Realists (trailer homes), the Brat Packers (nightclubs) or the New Narrativists (sexual transgression). But the wise old heads are also on his chopping block. So Nabokov, between ''Lolita'' and ''Pale Fire,'' sold out to ''sterile inventions.'' At the bottom of its bowl of ''watery oatmeal,'' the subtext of ''American Pastoral'' is Philip Roth's misogyny. Thomas Pynchon in ''a 30-year writing career hasn't produced a single memorable or even recognizably human character.'' Julian Barnes ''crawls under your skin and itches like scabies.'' Stanley Crouch's ''Don't the Moon Look Lonesome'' is such ''a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed and put forward in bad faith,'' that it's amazing the guy shows up on Charlie Rose. The ''ridiculous dithering'' of John Barth, John Hawkes and William Gaddis isn't even worth discussing, but they belong to ''a bankrupt tradition'' going back to James Joyce and ''the diarrheic flow of words that is 'Ulysses,' '' which tradition has now broken down ''like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of Don DeLillo.'' This isn't criticism. It isn't even performance art. It's thuggee. However entertaining in small doses -- we are none of us immune to malice, envy, schadenfreude, a prurient snuffle and a sucker punch -- as a steady diet it's worse for readers, writers and reviewers than self-abuse; it causes the kind of tone-deaf, colorblind, nerve-damaged and gum-sore literary journalism that screams ''Look at me!'' The rain comes down -- and the worms come out -- and just what the culture doesn't need is one more hall monitor, bounty hunter or East German border guard. Not that Peck hates everyone. There's Homer, E. M. Forster, Thomas Bernhard, Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut. But except for Vonnegut, all they get in his fleet passing are adjectives that glow like gumdrops in the dark. He would much rather seethe and twitch: ''If you aren't a novelist,'' he hair-shirts, ''I'm not sure you can imagine what it feels like to write such heresy. Though I normally write in the morning, I am writing this in the middle of the night like a fugitive; my hands are literally shaking as I type.'' Is he really that afraid of Heidi Julavits? The hit man is projecting. So Western literary culture went off the tracks with J. Joyce, smashed up entirely with D. DeLillo and deserves wholesale junk-heaping, from the modernists who merely twinkle-toed in the theater of war, one blood war after another, to the post-toasties who can't even tell anymore if they're being ironic. In place of the word games, Peck would bring back ''something ineffable, alchemical, mystical: the potent cocktail of writer and reader and language, of intention and interpretation, conscious and unconscious, text, subtext and context, narrative, character, metaphor'' -- novels ''illustrating the tension between society and the self,'' written by the old-fashioned sort of Author-God who ''feels guilty about causing his characters to suffer so much and offers them apologies in the form of epiphanies or the satisfaction of inhabiting a meaningful narrative.'' Scratch a commissar and you get a philistine. But I haven't mentioned Sven Birkerts, have I? Never mind DeLillo, who is smarter than all of us (except maybe Powers). Or Pynchon, whose Mason and Dixon are certainly more memorable than Peck's Martin and John. Or Whitehead, whose ''Intuitionist'' is a levitating marvel. Or Barnes, whose ''Flaubert's Parrot'' has been cunningly ignored. Never even mind Stanley Crouch, who dumped on Toni Morrison and so deserves finding out exactly what it feels like. But Peck devotes more than 30 contemptuous pages to Sven Birkerts, for the street crime and mortal sin of generosity in literary criticism. Think of it: with a whole world of worthy targets -- Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, Donald Trump, Conrad Black, Eli Manning, Shell Oil, Clear Channel, Conde Nast -- he mugs a man who has spent the last quarter of a century staying poor by reviewing other people's books, who has read more widely, warmly and deeply than the vampire bat fastened to his carotid, who should be commended rather than ridiculed for a willingness to take on a review of a new translation of Mandelstam's journals, and who, even though he wrote a regrettably mixed review of a book of mine in these pages, deserves far better from the community of letters, if there is one, than Peck's bumptious heehaw: ''With friends like this, literature needs an enema.'' It's the relish on this hotdog that turns the stomach. He promises never to do it again, but the very title ''Hatchet Jobs'' reeks of market niche, an underground service like fumigation or garbage recycling. His alibi for being unfair is that he's a novelist, and they lie a lot. But his reputation would have long since earned him the right at his various pillboxes and lemonade stands to review any book he chose, out of hundreds of good ones needing discovery among tens of thousands cynically published, and yet he almost always seems to pick a punching bag, or draw his own bull's-eye on the passing chump. This is lazy, churlish and even demagogic. I was going to suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom. But instead I'll tell a story. Many years ago the editor of this publication asked me to review John Cheever's last, brief novel, ''Oh What a Paradise It Seems,'' after he had already been turned down by half a dozen critics who knew that Cheever was dying but thought his new book a weak one and didn't want to compromise their supreme importance with a random act of kindness. It never occurred to me that a thank-you note to a wonderful writer, a valediction as it were, would get me kicked out of any club I wanted to belong to, so I immediately said yes. At the time, besides that review, I wanted to write a message to those preening scribblers who thought they were too good for lesser Cheever. On a card, in small caps, I would have said what I say to Peck: GET OVER YOURSELF. John Leonard reviews books for Harper's Magazine and The Nation, television for New York magazine and movies for ''CBS News Sunday Morning.''

Larry, I had never heard of Peck before reading this. Are you saying that he also lacks integrity? Surely, no pan of Stanley's "Don't the Moon Look Lonesome" should come as a surprise to anyone who has given it even a cursory look. Stanley's knuckles should be down to bare bone by now if this is how he routinely handles bad reviews.

Rainy, it sounds as if you are trying to defend Crouch. This is a first-rank opportunist whose bullish gutter behavior and blatant hypocrisy is indefensible--that would be the case, IMO, even if he were a good writer, even if he had extraordinary insight. When you write pap, you have to expect it to be recognized as such.

He is a terrible writer and an even worse human being. I just hope that he is sued this time around. Here's the story: The latest Crouch punch.

Live recording was made easier by the fact that Riverside had an old Greyhound bus that had been converted into a mobile control room. I used it on a recording trip to Chicago in 1961. Unfortunately, the label was in the early stages of its financial demise, so they assigned two "engineers" to my trip neither of whom cared for jazz. Their previous experience as recording engineers was that Sounds of the Home series--working with them was a nightmare.

I never thought Riverside had an identifiable sound, nor was there any attempt to create one. Just about all the NYC studio sessions were done at Plaza Sound Studio, which was located above Radio City Music Hall, and our engineer was Ray Fowler. Ray always monitored the sessions on cheap equipment, assuming that the albums would mostly be played back through systems that left something to be desired. If the stuff sounded good on low-end equipment, Ray was satisfied. The pressings were pretty unimpressive and, BTW, Prestige used the same company.

To me, there is no recorded intro that can beat Louis Armstrong's original "West End Blues." The goose bumps don't go away until Zutty puts the lid on it.

I don't recall the label, but I had a red vinyl "Smooth as the Wind" and it played from the center out (not a problem with my AR turntable). It was packaged in a laminated gatefold jacket with different artwork. That's the one I am referring to. Of course it was also released as a regular Riverside, otherwise it probably would have sold less than 10 copies!

The Sebring LPs did rather well, as I recall. There was also a series called "Sounds of the Home" (dripping faucets, slamming screen doors, etc.) which did not do so well, The inside out releases were on the Judson (another phone exchange) label, which purported to represent a new, proprietary recording technique, but didn't. There was a lengthy description of this technique on the sleeve--completely bogus. This was when consumers were seriously getting into audio, and record companies tried to outdo each other with proprietary sound achievement that had intriguing names but often were limited to that. As I recall, Blue Mitchell's "Smooth as the Wind" was the only jazz album released on Judson, but not many people had a turntable that could play from label to edge. Riverside also put out a few comedy albums. There was one by Ed Sherman (aka "George Crater" in down beat), a really interesting one by Peter Ustinov, and one containing a series of skits by a comedy team whose names escape me right now.

I don't know who that Riverside collector was, but he told you a tall tale. Also, Riverside did not issue 16 rpm discs, but Prestige did. It was not about collecting money from distributors. Riverside produced far too many releases (that number made even more staggering because mono and stereo were released separately, i.e. each album came out in two versions) and shipped them to distributors without getting orders for them. The result was that many albums were returned--in the meantime, shipping documents showing impressive "sales" produced money that kept the company afloat. That m. o. was a contributing factor. After Bill's death (not as your friend described), Orrin tried to keep the label going, even renting a computer to calculate how many pressings the market could bear, but he never trusted the machine's data. There was a lot of money wasted on odd projects at Riverside, such as a Judson release containing a six-minute imaginary race between two rare German automobiles. Bill wanted to stage and record (in stereo, of course) a bullfight at Yankee Stadium, but bullfights are unlawful here, and the lawyers failed to find a loophole!

I once had a girl Or should I say she once had me She showed me her room Isn't it good Norwegian wood? She asked me to stay And she told me to sit anywhere So I looked around And I noticed there wasn't a chair I sat on a rug biding my time drinking her wine We talked until two and then she said "it's time for bed" She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh I told her I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath And when I awoke I was alone This bird had flown So I lit a fire Isn't it good Norwegian wood?