Larry Kart

Larry was quoting Laurie Pepper (jazzwax comments)... those claims about not being involved with Lonehill etc are somewhat thin anyway because Pujol is one of their main distributors it seems... Larry claims Pujol is lying to our faces in the interview. Yes he mentions Laurie, whose remarks have a bearing only if Pujol is the owner of Lonehill and not just the distributor. So let me ask, what evidence is there that Pujol owns Lonehill, rather than just being the distributor? And what other lies does Pujol tell? I'll get back to you on that after the football game.

Of course I do. Among friends, in particular. But today's world being the way it is, if I expected my business associates and clients NEVER to lie to me on business matters I'd be utterly naive and probably unfit for business. Be that on alleged business deadline constraints, alleged money constraints, input to be provided from business associates or clients but being withheld for reasons that clearly are just excuses, etc. etc. (Note I have been self-employed in a freelance job for a very long time now so I've had some dealings here and there too and have come to take more than one business statement with a grain of salt and YET had to accept them at face value, despite the fact that I knew better . Knowing darn well you are being lied to right in your face sometimes is just part of the game.) And just to repeat my question (and sorry for being quite to the point now), and may I - with all due respect - please ask you not to be evasive: What would your guess be what OTHER P.D. reissue labels would say if they were asked the same question about the legitimacy of those products being sold in the US (where the P.D. laws differ from those in other parts of the world)? And please don't tell me they had not been asked and that this question is therefore beside the point. Because it is not (as the underlying problem exists with those "other" labels too and we all know it) but in this case I would have to assume that you prefer not to know and not to find out. Which in the end would put us all very close together in how we prefer to deal (or should I say "cope") with "the world being the way it is today". To answer your question, of course I would expect other PD labels (and labels that were, like Pujols', non-PD in part before they became predominently PD according to the laws of their own countries) to answer in much the same manner Pujols has if they were forced to. So? My feelings about those labels are the same as they are about Pujols and his family of labels. One tends to focus on Pujols in part because he doesn't hide in the shadows (do any of those other PD labels have a highly visible owner-spokesman?) but puts himself forward as a noble poster boy.

So if I lie to my friends and associates, including (should it come to pass) you, that's "today's world being the way it is," and you have no problem with my behavior?

Again one of those "Which was first? The chicken or the egg"-type questions ... With all due respect, but to me this really is like a HUGE lot of sales transactions involving exporting (and therefore importing) goods from around the world into another country that may be subject to different laws of what is allowed to be sold in the respective destination (importing) country. Such as radar warning devices mnarketed legally in the USA and strictly illegal in Germany, or pharmaceutical goods and medical products legally on sale in the USA and exported wholesale by US peddlers (or should I say "dealers" to stick with a term used on that other Pujol thread? ) to destinations around the world, and in some countries in Europe they are strictly illegal and anybody caught importing them (even for private end use) there will be fined heavily. No notion anywhere in the destination countries of putting the blame on the sellers, though. See the parallelity? Now tell me, if you will, please - where are the U.S. enforcement bodies that will curtail importing these goods (CD) if they are so illegal there? Sleeping on the job? Too indifferent to care? See where the blame definitely lies too (or even primarily)? IMHO putting the blame on the seller and exporter (who is only satisfying a demand the legality of which is for the importer to clarify and regulate in their specific destination countries as this is where IMPORT rules are applicable) is irrelevant as long as in the abovementioned examples (and many more, against the total gross transaction volume of which this CD businiess really pales) the exporters aren't just a much taken to task. But, again, Pujol himself is lying. Doesn't that tell you something ... anything? I guess now's the time to say this...almost every time I get a pointer to a Marc Myers interview or article, I leave somewhat (or more) underwhelmed. This campaign(?) to rehabilitate the image of el ladrón pequeño does nothing to sway me from my impressions that he is "probably not the guy for me" when it comes to online jazz commentary. I agree about commentary, but he's the right guy if you want to read a five-part interview with the likes of Hal McKusick -- and I do.

Big Beat Steve -- But in this interview (with the unfortunate aid of the interviewer, who is otherwise a nice, bright guy) Pujol is lying to our faces more than he is "covering up." Sure, Jack Kapp, Herman Lubinsky, and a host of other guys in the record business were the goniffs and thugs that they were, but did they give interviews in which they claimed to be honorable, ethical men and lied in order to bolster that image? The issue here, as much as it is Pujol, is us. As Jim has pointed out before, if we want the "drugs" Pujol's selling, many of of us will buy them from time to time, or even wholesale, and come up with a sliding scale of rationalization, but I think we owe it to ourselves not to buy Pujol's "ethical" act when we know the facts to be otherwise. Further, where does that leave record business figures like Alfred Lion and Chuck Nessa -- the latter as ethical as anyone I know in any field (and at a good deal of cost to himself in money and effort), the former ethical as far as I know. In both cases, I know, directly or indirectly, something about how much their ethics were/are inseparable from their shrewd aesthetic judgment and their ability to build bonds of trust with musicians who then went on, to a good extent as a result of these bonds) to produce excellent and often unique recordings under their aegis.

Seems to me from the interview with Pujol (and from the many responses to it here and elsewhere and from prior discusssions about Pjuol here) that we know for sure that he feels the need to lie about some of what he does -- e.g. about the family relationship (at the least) between the various labels (see Laurie Pepper's story), and a number of other topics that came up on the previous Pujol thread in response to Marc Myer's interview (see David Weiss' post, for one). Whatever Pujol's motives for doing this -- image-shaping, an attempt to protect himself in some ways, etc. -- is this not some significant sign of the kind of guy Pujol is? How many other people do you know and trust who lie like this?

Goodspeak -- I don't know to what cut-and-paste post you're referring; enlighten me. As for what you did, just don't do it again.

Lillian Fuchs on viola: http://www.amazon.com/Bach-6-Suites-Cello-Solo/dp/B00079W8PY/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321063518&sr=1-1-catcorr

Goodspeak -- In post #76 you changed the words that Brad used in post #75 in the course of "quoting" what he had said there. No matter what your intent in doing so, that is forbidden, for reasons that I'm sure I don't need to explain.

Do you think we'll eventually find out that the case that was closed by the University Police in 1998 was closed in part because of pressure from within and above? Further, given that Sandusky was widely regarded as Paterno's heir apparent, why was he told when still in his 50s that the job would not be his and why, with his long track record of high achievement as a coach, did he then retire and not get a job coaching elsewhere? Curious, no? He did, after all, groom every linebacker at Linebacker U. for 32 years and would seem like a person who would be in demand. Could it be that be that Joe Pa scratched him off the list because he knew or suspected post 1998 what Sandusky was up to? Also, you do know that the DA in that case then went missing and that his computer, with its hard drive missing, was found in a river: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/sports/ncaafootball/questions-on-sandusky-wrapped-in-2005-gricar-mystery.html?scp=1&sq=gricar&st=cse

He always stood behind her?

Well, she worked underneath the founder, so to speak.

Again, JETman -- no personal attacks.

JETman --you've recently been warned that you've been getting out of hand on another thread. I'm warning you that you're getting out of hand on this one. Stop.

OK -- I'll go a step further. Seems to me that our culture's seemingly broad response to the grim facts of child abuse is to construct a Gothic and itself near-pornographic horror story of "unimaginable" disgusting crimes that justify (even cry out for) the most extreme/violent forms of punishment imaginable. What lies at the base of this? Our need to at once regard childhood as a state of primal innocence (sexual innocence in particular), the fact that childhood is not in many ways a state of sexual innocence, the apparently increasing need on the part of many of us (at some times and in some ways) to sexualize the image of children and adolescents, and, the icing on this circular cake, our need to find something in this increasingly relativistic world that we can agree on (and virtually feed on) as an absolute, quintessential evil. Take a look back at the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case and the need/desire of much of our culture to gaze again and again at images of that sexualized and now dead child and the assumption on the part of so many who did that gazing with so much fascination that the parents who sexualized her so overtly must have killed her. Well, it seems clear now that they didn't, but doesn't that circle of intense communal response tell us something? Again, the above is not meant to minimize the grim facts of child abuse but to suggest that our culture (or much of it) is inclined to take that ball and run with it in a manner that itself borders on the pornographic. As one far from unintelligent sports talk show host in my area has been saying over and over in response to the Sandusky-Penn State affair, "When it comes to child abuse and its victims, the horror never ends." One knows what he means here in one sense, but I think this is also evidence in part of our Gothic desire that there still be a "horror that never ends." As this same commentator also said, "You may feel as I do, wishing you actually believed in Hell." Here, I think, the circle closes.

Another possible factor in McQueary taking what he saw to his father and then to Paterno, not to the police: I've heard lots of talk in the wake of this (especially from sports columnists and on sports talk radio) that what Sandusky did is at once the worst and most unimaginable of crimes -- so much so that it would justify immediate slaughter of the perpetrator, that we'll be delighted when he's eventually slaughtered in prison as a "short eyes," etc. Not at all denigrate the ugliness of what Sandusky did, but if in fact we grant (or demonstrate ourselves, in our response to them) that his specific criminal acts blow all or a good many of our emotional fuses, why then can't we understand that witnessing them as the McQueary did might have blown a lot of his emotional fuses too -- and more so than we at our computers can readily imagine? Is that a definitive or sufficient excuse? No. But as Big Wheel said a while ago, How about a little empathy (as in understanding)? Also, I think from what McQueary did and didn't do, the concept of "family" (i.e. keeping profoundly disturbing material in the "family -- first his own fathere, then Joe Pa, and of course he knew that Sandusky had been a key member of the Penn State "family") might have been front and center in his mind -- not, again, that that's right or sufficient, just that it doesn't automatically make McQueary a heartless monster. As a wise man one said to me, Most people do the best they can do.

Agree on Alex Ross, but Lebrecht is a hack of a different sort, a kind of Hedda Hopper who makes numerous gross factual errors.

Dan Gould's last post has been deleted -- no "personal attacks." JETman's, too. We've been here before.

Nobody owns a cat.

The plain and simple truth. Ask Joe Paterno (i.e. ask him now).

Jim.

Another aspect of this (can't find the story now, but I read it yesterday) is that pro-Paterno and anti-Paterno forces (at the upper levels of the school's administration) at Penn State have been locked in behind-the-scenes combat for more than a decade -- the latter wanting to get rid of/ease out the cranky, dictatorial "I get whatever I want" Joe P., the former fiercely defensive of Joe P. and their own prerogatives that stem from him. Exactly how that strife played into the handling (or nonhandling) of this scandal, I'm not sure, but one could see where it might have led all sides there to see it primarily through the lenses of their own goals and antagonisms rather than thinking of the allegedly abused kids, not to mention all the kids who might be (and allegedly were) abused down the road.

To quote a Facebook post by a friend who was a sportswriter for decades: "Re the Penn State thing and no one doing right by those kids: Closing your eyes/turning your back/wearing blinders/etc. is the only way big-time college sports exists on most campuses. This is merely a tragic extension of an already corrupt culture."

BTW, even though I thought the logic of what was actually happening onstage supported my sense that she was chastising the Lithuanian soprano saxist for playing too much and not giving Boykin a chance (though I chalk up what was happening to that point to Boykin's diffidence, not to any piggishness on the Lithuanian player's part), I've since found out that the off-the-wall lady was a Lithuanian fan of the very good soprano saxist, and thus she may have wanted Boykin to not play at all. Weird.