Larry Kart

Sensible policy, fine with me. I just got my wires crossed somewhere, and as the only serving moderator, now that MG is on hiatus, my wires need to be uncrossed at all times.

Though the thrust of the original post here was essentially benign IMO, discussions of and requests for unauthorized releases of copyrighted material are not allowed on Organissimo. I'm posting this now in order not to be rude or mysterious but will delete this thread later on today.

I agree about that BBC Tippett-conducted disc, and the Piano Concerto is my favorite work of his. I have the old Colin Davis-John Ogdon recording on LP, plus the relatively recent Stephen Osborne-Martyn Brabbins Hyperion 2-CD set with the Concerto and the Piano Sonatas. I prefer the Ogdon-Davis for its air of intoxication and (so it seems to me) pastoral eroticism -- it occurred to me once that the marvelous piano-celeste dialogue passages were the sonic equivalent for Tippett of the sort of sexual romps he favored -- but the Osborne-Brabbins is very good too. Probably my preference for the Ogdon-Davis is mostly imprinting.

And/or "two white guys who really couldn't stand other."

I couldn't get it to play loud enough on my Mac enough to pick up much, especially what Fred was saying. Too bad, because what I could make out sounded fascinating.

After quoting from Chilton, Brian Priestley's notes for "The Jazz Scene" reissue add: "Even nonmusicians, however, have often compared it to 'Body and Soul,' for the simple reason that the implied chordal background of 'Picasso' is a chorus and half of the 1931 song 'Prisoner of Love' (itself very similar to 'Body and Soul' but with a different key for the channel)."

That's your opinion, and you are certainly entitled. Scan, if you would, the citations I, and others, made here of brilliant parodies of our society and especially the cold war by Mad----under Willaim Gaines' stewardship---in the 60s. If you still disagree-----then we will both agree to do that. Perhaps I am wrong here, but I think part of this---and the criticism of Mad post-60s by myself, post 50s by yourself, and comments made here by more than one---may well be the age-old defensiveness of one's generation over the following one. Human nature....... Anyway, why take Mad so damn seriously? Let's frickin' lighten up. I mean: WHAT, ME WORRY? I'm familiar with the later-day MAD up to a point. Nicely done as they were in many respects, the Mort Drucker, and Drucker-like, parodies of movies and TV shows exemplify the difference IMO. The impulse behind the Elder, Wood and Jack Davis stuff, with Kurtzman in each case as key behind-the-scenes collaborator, was ... well I don't know if "anarchic" even goes far enough. It was a matter of size and potentially wholesale substitution of assumptions; the given material -- Superman, Archie, Flash Gordon, Sherlock Holmes, The Lone Ranger, Blackhawks, Terry and The Pirates, Mandrake the Magician, et al. -- was merely the ground-base for extravagantly surreal riffing whose goal was not so much to parody the given universe but to flee it/replace it/blow it up. Yes, the vintage MAD at best was insanely funny, but to be insanely funny in those ways at that time also seemed kind of serious to us kids on the receiving end. For one thing, it was just about the only thing of that sort that the culture was coming up with at that time on any level, let alone one that was available to and largely aimed at 10-year-olds. I mean, Lenny Bruce wouldn't be up and running for at least another FIVE years.

Prime MAD time essentially ended with the departure of Harvey Kurtzman in April 1956, though there were talented people who remained for a while and some talented people to come.

I was buying/reading MAD when it made the transition from comic book to magazine. It was like discovering you were a vampire, and that fresh blood was available at your local newsstand for 10 cents a pop. I have the four-volume hardbound 1986 Russ Cochran color reprint of MAD issues 1-23. A friend -- and that's some friend! -- gave me the set for Xmas back then. He also got a set for himself.

Mine are in Japanese.....what did you say? "Art Farmer, for my taste, never played as well as he did during this period, perhaps because the hard bop style was at war with his deadening sense of neatness. Possessing a musical mind of dandiacal suavity coupled with the soul of a librarian, Farmer usually sounded too nice to be true. But this rhythm section puts an edge on his style".... etc. "Adams' problem has always been how to give his lines some sense of overall design; and too often the weight of his huge tone hurtles him forward faster than he can think...." etc. From a distance of almost 30 years, I can still see what I was talking about in both cases, but that's much too snotty.

File sharing not permitted!

Worth it for the liner notes in which yours truly (circa 1980) says snotty things about Pepper Adams and Art Farmer that he wishes he could take back.

Tiny Kahn was a fine and distinctive arranger, but why disparage Mulligan's work? At its best, his writing for big band was superb (e.g. his chart on "All The Things You Are," featuring Don Joseph). Also, FWIW, in Ira Gitler's "Swing To Bop," p. 287, Mulligan says this of the band of New York freelancers who recorded the "Elliot Lawrence Plays Gerry Mulligan" album: "...the New York guys [here Mulligan is speaking in general] were so rigid..... They couldn't play my charts worth a damn.... One of the proofs of it is that when Elliot finally recorded some of the charts that I wrote, long after I wrote them and long after the band was really terrific. But he got a bunch of the New York guys together, and, of course, this is partially unfair, because they did not have adequate rehearsal time, and Elliot never invited me to come rehearse the band. Those guys could have played the things, but left to their own devices, it just didn't really come out well." Lord knows that Mulligan could be a prima donna, and I like the Lawrence-Mulligan album myself, but he has a point -- the interpretations probably are a fair bit more generically "swingy" than Mulligan intended. Again, hear that "All The Things You Are." That's the kind of phrasing (in terms of rhythm and shifts in texture) that he had in mind, as flowing as Gil Evans' but with a flavor of its own.

I like a lot of Bill Evans up through the Vanguard recordings, and then I don't mostly -- for a load of reasons I wrote about at some length in Ye Olde Book.

Huge amounts of Bob and Ray can be found here: http://www.bobandray.com/

Interesting, though would we say the same about Krazy Kat (that it doesn't go anywhere)? There are occasional short narrative arcs, but ultimately everything comes back to a kat, a mouse, a brick, a dog and a jail. It is almost a meditation on the endless repetitiveness of life, as well as the perversity of love and desire or the many faces of crime and punishment. But it is also awfully repetitive. I really do like Ben Katchor's older work (hard to find his new work now) but it is all very much of one tone -- a lament on the passing of Brooklyn of the 1950s. The characters sort of walk through this half-remembered, half-invented city having adventures nearly as momentous as Leopold Bloom's, but do they "go anywhere?" I had some other examples in mind, but I have forgotten them. That said, I tend to find reading Chris Ware's panels fairly exhausting and the reward for going through everything isn't usually worth it, since the punchline is that you grow old and die alone. The ones I do like are the ones in the apartment building with the young woman with the artificial leg. They hold my interest a bit better. But "Krazy Kat" is funny! The way "ultimately everything comes back to a kat, a mouse, a brick, a dog and a jail" is the essence of its wit. The "circling back" resolutions are the shape of the jokes, and the jokes (if you're so inclined) work. Now I can imagine any number of reasonable people finding "Krazy Kat" to be both unamusing and repetitive, but I have no doubt that George Herriman himself almost always found it both absorbing and amusing and hoped/assumed that others would too. By contrast, the "payoff" in Chris Ware's panels seems to be that he and we are still standing in s--t, and that he kind of enjoys being there. E-e-e-s-h. Nice drawing, though.

Bear in mind that Moore was writing for DC comics, a company that primarily publishes superhero comics. You are right, of course. Comics don't HAVE to be about superheroes. As with any medium, comics can accomidate any and all subject matters and genres. Some of the best comics are NOT about superheroes (Spiegelman's "Maus"; Satrapi's "Persepolis"; Clowes' "Ghost World"; Ware's "ACME Novelty Library" and "Jimmy Corrigan"; Bagge's "Hate"). I love "Hate." Me, too, as well as "Ghost World," but Chris Ware puts me to sleep, and I despise "Maus." How can one despise "Maus"? Do you dislike the art? Or is it that it has become an untouchable "classic," taught in high schools and universities? Ware is an amazing draughtsman. I don't think any living cartoonist draws buildings as well (he's probably the greatest since Windsor McCay). I also love the fact that his stories hit so close to home that it's unsettling. Every one of his books and strips makes me feel depressed and creepy. He's brilliant! I found the basic ploy in "Maus" (use of humanoid animals to retell events of the Holocaust) to be cheap, trivializing, smug, morally offensive, you name it. YMMV, but I felt that in my gut at first glance and do every time I take another look at "Maus." Don't like anything else I've seen from Spiegelman either; he's a pretentious little twit IMO, whose eye was always on the main chance. Ware is a superb draughtsman, but how often, and with such an agonizing lack of incident, do I need to visit the land of self-indulgent depression and creepiness. Push the damn thing somewhere, Chris! Daniel Clowes does, and I wouldn't say that he's any less melancholic than Ware. Underlying all this, perhaps, is the way I see the whole "new comics" medium -- not that it's monolithic, but either I'm way off in my thinking here, or you'll catch my drift. Both historically and inherently, the medium is one of pictorial storytelling (I know -- "duh"), and while under the stress of various (for want of better term) post-modern impulses (self-conscious and otherwise) a whole lot of sometimes very effective dicking around with that narrative storytelling basis has been done, too much dicking around, and/or tone-deaf dicking around (vide "Maus" IMO), or dicking around taken to the point of navel-gazing near abstraction, etc., and there's nothing left but broken parts on the ground. Actually, I think that was, from the other side of things, a big part of Bill Griffith's profound dislike of "Watchmen" -- that Alan Moore was too attached to the medium's pictorial storytelling impulses and some its familiar trappings, that he wasn't hip and "liberated" enough. Well, I'm all for hipness and liberation when it works in terms of the medium, but when it doesn't, I get bored or annoyed. All the above opinions are subjective, of course, but my sense of the underlying structural issues might be useful, even to "Maus" lovers.

Bear in mind that Moore was writing for DC comics, a company that primarily publishes superhero comics. You are right, of course. Comics don't HAVE to be about superheroes. As with any medium, comics can accomidate any and all subject matters and genres. Some of the best comics are NOT about superheroes (Spiegelman's "Maus"; Satrapi's "Persepolis"; Clowes' "Ghost World"; Ware's "ACME Novelty Library" and "Jimmy Corrigan"; Bagge's "Hate"). I love "Hate." Me, too, as well as "Ghost World," but Chris Ware puts me to sleep, and I despise "Maus."

What a beautiful guy he was -- brought something new and beautiful into the world of humor. As you probably know, Cox and Marlon Brando were close friends from age 10 or so, growing up in Evanston, Il., and eventually were roommates in NYC, along with a talented artist, Richard Loving (also from Evanston or thereabouts I believe, and apparently still with us and teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago). I met Loving and his wife in the early '60s because they were friends of the parents of a then-girlfriend -- her parents (a generation older than Loving, Cox, and Brando) were friends (or at least good acquaintances) of Brando's parents. I hesitate about "friends of" because Brando's father, Marlon Sr., seemed to be regarded as something of a monster.

Blue Train, Another Workout ... Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet. Those, too, plus the rest of the series "Cookin'" is from. Again, the "feel" of each of those dates seems fairly specific -- a sign I would think (if true) of how alert and in the moment Chambers and Jones tended to be, PJJ especially. I only saw him play once, but I was essentially looking over his left shoulder from a table half a step up from the bandstand. I can close my eyes and see him. It was like watching Fred Astaire.

Off the top of my head, "Cool Struttin'" and "Kelly Great." P.S. And Miles' "Milestones." Interesting how each of those dates has its own feel.

In part "Watchmen" plays off of and plays with the longtime pre-existing fascination with costumed superheros, this fascination having been a good-sized social fact at least since the advent of Superman and thus no less a part of "our real world" than a good many other things that might seem at first to exist only in the collective imagination but in fact also slop over the edges (in part because the initial fantasies that fueled these realizations in comic book/comic strip form involved the slopping over into the popular entertainment medium of already substantial real-world fears and dreams). Alan Moore's sense of all this is very sure IMO, though of course he takes several big (or not so big?) steps by having his superheros function overtly in the real world of "Watchmen." For example, it could be argued -- and it has been by some historians -- that the collective ideological underpinnings of, say, our adventure in Vietnam cast the American military in the role of an agonized superhero that of course could not be outfought on any battlefield but instead was finally betrayed and/or abandoned by spineless (or worse) elements on the home front. That framework, it would seem, still remains in place. Finally, there are many graphic novels without costumed superheros; that particular stew of fears and wishes is not the be-all of the form. But it is part of its DNA, and it didn't come from nowhere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Cameron I caught him live once with Slide Hampton in Chicago in the early '60s. Nice band, interesting, intelligent guy IIRC, had something of a Manhattan cool bohemian vibe. Met him because I was with a girl who either knew or presumed to know most of the band (could have been either); among them was the enigmatic Hobart Dotson.

Saw it today. Sadly, I agree with everything Alexander said. All I would add is that in terms of pace there is a peculiarly anti-cinematic, plodding step-by-step feel to it-- the pace, as Alexander suggests, of someone moving from panel to panel in a too literal minded, up-tight manner. Also, as Alexander says, Ozymandias needs to be glowing and charismatic. This actor has all the appeal of a used mop.

Listened to the Bennett album. He can play the instrument, but he's very bland, especially rhythmically -- "dorky" might be the right word. In a way it's an interesting reminder of how much rhythmic edge (plus a meaningfully varied sense of attack on most every note, no matter what the tempo) there usually was to BG's playing. Took me a fairly long time before I began to get BG the player, but I'm glad I finally did. I think it was that RCA set of the small groups with Wilson, Hampton, and Krupa that really turned the light on.