7/4

Boy howdy, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aQ9P4qi8uo... anyways...I loved this band. some of those tunes still hold up today. I'd say my favorite album is Who Do We Think We Are?

Yes. Ouch. the sad truth...'fraid so...

That looks so casual.

Mee too.

Nah. Worked fine with my FireFox.

Sounds like a reasonable request to me. Like I said, I just couldn't stop myself. It's a never ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way. .

Exactly!

Alex Ross?

sweet! 7/4 aka David Beardsley

May 14, 2008 When an Anchor Curses on the Air, She Becomes the Night’s Top Story By JAMES BARRON, NYTimes Maybe that will teach Chuck to stop reading things on his computer monitor and start paying attention to Sue. It looked like a spat between two people who have worked together for so long that they know each other’s rhythms a little too well. And, of course, they have worked together, for ages — or at least since 1980. There was Chuck Scarborough, reading something on a computer screen embedded in the desk and not listening to his co-anchor, Sue Simmons. So she let him have it in what sounded like mock derision. But she used a word seldom heard on the noncable air, and then only by accident — a word that is not publishable in the newspaper. The difference between them and, say, a couple having a spat over the dinner table was that they were on television — live television, on a network-owned station in the nation’s largest media market. It happened during a promotional spot at about 10:30 p.m. on Monday night on WNBC-TV, when they were supposed to describe stories that would be on their newscast at 11. By Tuesday morning, the outburst had New Yorkers talking about the nature of cursing in everyday conversation — not to mention the nature of Ms. Simmons, almost as permanent a presence in local news as there can be — and about how some things seem to be appropriate nowadays, even on television — and some things are not. “That gets thrown around like ‘hello’ and ‘good morning,’ ” said Omar Villaneuva, a doorman at 27 West 72nd Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, referring to the word Ms. Simmons used. “But when you’re a news reporter, you’re supposed to report the news. You’re not there to swear.” Peter King, who works in an architectural office on the Upper West Side, echoed Mr. Villaneuva’s point. “It’s overused, and we are crasser than we were for it,” Mr. King said. “It’s just another indication of standards declining. I mean, I curse like a sailor, but I know how to talk to my dad and talk to clients, versus how to talk to my friends.” Mr. King said he remembered when the word Ms. Simmons used was “shocking, as opposed to tiresome.” Tiresome? “Yeah,” he said. “If you see movies or plays, it’s a writer’s gimmick.” But this was no David Mamet play. Each night around 10:25, the anchors on Channel 4 tape a 15-second spot promoting the 11 p.m. newscast. Occasionally, it has to be done live. On Monday night, according to someone who works at Channel 4 and has direct knowledge of the situation, Ms. Simmons and Mr. Scarborough thought the spot was being taped. When they were cued, Ms. Simmons read her line: “At 11, paying more at the grocer, but getting less. We’ll tell you how to get the most.” The station then cut to images for an upcoming story about a cruise ship, without any narrative from the two anchors. At that point, Ms. Simmons says, basically, What are you doing? But her question had two extra words. Ms. Simmons, looking genuinely pained, apologized during the 11 p.m. broadcast. “While we were live just after 10 o’clock,” she said, “I said a word that many people find offensive. I’m truly sorry. It was a mistake on my part, and I sincerely apologize.” Channel 4 would not say whether it was considering disciplining Ms. Simmons; the station said it did not comment on personnel matters. She appeared on the station’s 5 p.m. newscast on Tuesday, as scheduled. “How do you cope under pressure?” asked Willie Pope, who was collecting donations for the United Homeless Organization at Columbus Avenue and West 72nd Street on Tuesday. “I have people who call me everything in the book. Back in the day, I’d go after the person, take action.” Not anymore. Now, he said, “I try my best not to curse.” And he said that a television anchor should not curse, either. Sarah Bassine, a filmmaker, said that Ms. Simmons was a role model. “It’s not setting a particularly good example to be cursing on the air,” she said. “I think that profanity has taken a place in our society where it’s all too acceptable as a form of communication. It’s a lazy form of communication. Certainly, a newscaster should be able to express herself or himself better. People who are in the public eye have a responsibility to conduct themselves in a responsible manner.” Linda Murray, a graduate student originally from Ireland, said that after 9 p.m. in Europe, the standards are looser. But then she had second thoughts about that. “I guess it’s inappropriate for the news,” she said. “There’s a perception of professionalism.” Ms. Simmons’ eyebrow-raising word-bomb brought back memories of, among others, television reporter Arthur Chi’en, who was fired from WCBS-TV for shouting an obscenity at some hecklers on the air in 2005. An arbitrator ruled in 2006 that he should have been disciplined, not dismissed. Now a reporter for WPIX-TV’s “CW11 News at 10,” Mr. Chi’en did not return a call for comment on Tuesday. It also brought back memories of Mara Wolynski, a reporter at WABC-TV in the 1980s who made an obscene gesture that was caught on camera. That same gesture was made by Prof. Alain E. Kaloyeros of the State University of New York in Albany, and a photograph of it was published in The New York Post two days in a row. That photo was taken at the end of a meeting, Professor Kaloyeros said in a telephone interview on Tuesday, and the person who snapped it had “made a derogatory comment” about two female colleagues flanking Professor Kaloyeros. He said the gesture was meant to show that he was “taking exception to a joke about age and looks.” “I learned my lesson,” he said. “Even in a private joking moment, keep all my digits to myself.” Ms. Simmons and Mr. Scarborough “are talented, smart, competent people,” said Richard Wald, a former president of NBC News and senior vice president of ABC News who is now the Fred W. Friendly professor of media and society at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. (Mr. Wald said that Ms. Simmons and Mr. Scarborough worked under him when he was vice president for news at the local stations that NBC owned around the country.) “Local anchors become a piece of the community,” Mr. Wald said, “and they are to television what typeface is to your local newspaper. They are the way in which you get the information. I think that live television is lucky that there aren’t more minor errors like that because it’s tricky, and it requires a great deal of concentration, and I guess her concentration must have slipped.”

I know, I tried, I couldn't help myself. .

Newsday.com WNBC says it's still standing behind Sue Simmons Verne Gay May 15, 2008 Sue stays. WNBC/4 released another statement late yesterday apologizing again for the late-evening gaffe on Monday, when the station's veteran anchor Sue Simmons yelled a four-letter word during a tease for the 11 p.m. news. But yesterday's statement - which a spokesperson declined to elaborate on - also appeared designed to dash media speculation that Simmons' 28-year tenure was imperiled by the outburst. "Sue Simmons is a highly valued 30-year veteran of WNBC," said the statement. "Sue, along with WNBC, remains deeply sorry for her offensive remark on Monday night for which she quickly apologized. It was an unfortunate mistake that she truly regrets." The gaffe wasn't only a public relations embarrassment for the station - gearing up to launch a 24-hour local news channel and struggling to contain costs in the face of declining ratings - but a personal one for the well-liked Simmons.

I guess, but it's such a sad state of affairs that she even "needed" to do that. I can't imagine that a day goes by when 90% of the American public doesn't use or at least hear that word. It's just silly ... not that i'm beyond using the word, but she looks like a hard, tough cookie to me. bet she'd be pretty without all that heavy theatrical makeup. IMHO, of course! She is extremely cute... Wiki: Susan Simmons (born May 27, 1943) has been the lead female anchor at WNBC television in New York City since 1980. I didn't know...

Oh what the hell: I was bored. Look who's talking! Do a search through the board archives and look to see all the over the top angry shit Dan posted over the years.

I know. It's another one of those long ass NYer articles.

Ah...I love it! This is our local NBC news. I heard about this...I wonder what she was referring to...

Neil Young to release archive on Blu-ray discs.

A Critic at Large American Sublime Morton Feldman’s mysterious musical landscapes. by Alex Ross June 19, 2006 Morton Feldman was a big, brusque Jewish guy from Woodside, Queens—the son of a manufacturer of children’s coats. He worked in the family business until he was forty-four years old, and he later became a professor of music at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He died in 1987, at the age of sixty-one. To almost everyone’s surprise but his own, he turned out to be one of the major composers of the twentieth century, a sovereign artist who opened up vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound. He was also one of the greatest talkers in the recent history of New York City, and there is no better way to introduce him than to let him speak for himself: Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room. My concern at times is nothing more than establishing a series of practical conditions that will enable me to work. For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart. My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. . . . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, “What about the man on the street?” At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street. The crazy artist of my generation was crossing the street at that moment. If a man teaches composition in a university, how can he not be a composer? He has worked hard, learned his craft. Ergo, he is a composer. A professional. Like a doctor. But there is that doctor who opens you up, does exactly the right thing, closes you up—and you die. He failed to take the chance that might have saved you. Art is a crucial, dangerous operation we perform on ourselves. Unless we take a chance, we die in art. Just concentrate on not making the lazy move. Polyphony sucks. Because I’m Jewish, I do not identify with, say, Western civilization music. In other words, when Bach gives us a diminished fourth, I cannot respond that the diminished fourth means, O God. . . . What are our morals in music? Our moral in music is nineteenth-century German music, isn’t it? I do think about that, and I do think about the fact that I want to be the first great composer that is Jewish. These quotations are taken from three collections of Feldman’s writings, lectures, and interviews: “Morton Feldman Essays,” which was published in 1985; “Give My Regards to Eighth Street,” which appeared in 2000; and the new anthology “Morton Feldman Says,” edited by Chris Villars (Hyphen; $50). The books testify to the composer’s rich, compact, egotistical, playful, precise, poetic, and insidiously quotable way with language. The titles of his works make music on their own: “The Viola in My Life,” “Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety,” “Routine Investigations,” “Coptic Light,” “The King of Denmark,” “I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg.” A champion monologuist, Feldman had an uncanny ability to dominate the most illustrious company. Six feet tall, and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he was hard to miss. He attended meetings of the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, the headquarters of the Abstract Expressionists; he made his presence felt at gatherings of the New York School of poets, dancers, and painters, lavishing sometimes unwanted attention on the women in the room; he both amused and affronted other composers. John Adams told me that he once attended a new-music festival in Valencia, California, and stayed at a tacky motel called the Ranch House Inn. When Adams came down for breakfast, he found various leading personalities of late-twentieth-century music, including Steve Reich, Iannis Xenakis, and Milton Babbitt, sitting with Feldman, who proceeded to talk through the entire meal. “A lovable solipsist,” Adams called him. The often noted paradox is that this immense, verbose man wrote music that seldom rose above a whisper. In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft. Chords arrive one after another, in seemingly haphazard sequence, interspersed with silences. Harmonies hover in a no man’s land between consonance and dissonance, paradise and oblivion. Rhythms are irregular and overlapping, so that the music floats above the beat. Simple figures repeat for a long time, then disappear. There is no exposition or development of themes, no clear formal structure. Certain later works unfold over extraordinarily lengthy spans of time, straining the capabilities of performers to play them and audiences to hear them. More than a dozen pieces last between one and two hours, and “For Philip Guston” and “String Quartet (II)” go on for much longer. In its ritual stillness, this body of work abandons the syntax of Western music, and performers must set aside their training to do it justice. Legend has it that after one group of players had crept their way as quietly as possible through a score of his Feldman barked, “It’s too fuckin’ loud, and it’s too fuckin’ fast.” For a time, it appeared that Feldman would be remembered as one of several experimental composers who were gathered around John Cage. In the past two decades, however, his reputation has steadily ascended, even though his works remain rarities on American concert programs. There are well over a hundred CDs of his music, most of it on intrepid small labels such as Hat Art, New Albion, CRI, CPO, and the indispensable Mode Records, which is in the process of issuing parallel editions of Feldman and Cage. According to Villars’s meticulous online discography, all but a handful of Feldman’s hundred and forty published works can be found on CD, and some have been recorded many times; ten pianists have essayed the ninety-minute “Triadic Memories.” The music has found an audience not only among new-music connoisseurs but also among adventurous fans of rock and pop, who are quick to respond to its unearthly power. In a 1982 lecture that is reprinted in “Morton Feldman Says,” the composer asks, “Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?” If we didn’t before, we do now. Feldman, whose parents came to America from Kiev, grew up in the cosmopolitan New York of the nineteen-thirties and forties, when Fiorello LaGuardia championed high art for the working man and émigré European artists crowded the streets. Feldman studied piano with Vera Maurina Press, a legendary pedagogue who had been a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni. (She is the “Madame Press” who “Died Last Week at Ninety.”) His first composition teacher was Wallingford Riegger, one of the earliest American followers of Arnold Schoenberg. He went on to study with Stefan Wolpe, who, just a few years earlier, had been agitating against the Nazis in Berlin. Young Morty also had several long talks with the expatriate ultra-modernist Edgard Varèse. When you write, Varèse would tell him, think about how long it takes for the sound to travel to the back of the hall. Feldman’s student efforts, which are now showing up on recordings on the Mode and OgreOgress labels, emulate Schoenberg and Bartók, but there is already something unusual in the arrangement of events; as per Varèse’s instruction, Feldman lets loose a striking chord and then lets it reverberate in the listener’s mind. The crux of Feldman’s development came in 1950, when he entered the world of John Cage. The odd couple of the musical avant-garde—the gay, gaunt, Anglo-Saxon Californian and the straight, burly, Russian-Jewish New Yorker—met one night at Carnegie Hall, where they had both gone to hear Dimitri Mitropoulos conduct Anton Webern’s twelve-tone Symphony. Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances” was next on the program, and both men walked out early, to avoid having their modernist spell disrupted by Rachmaninoff’s romanticism. As their paths intersected, Feldman asked, “Wasn’t that beautiful?” And a friendship was born. Feldman visited Cage in his tenement apartment at the corner of Monroe and Grand Streets, where the East River Houses are now. The kid from Queens gazed in wonder at Cage’s austere bohemian décor: the Lippold mobiles, the straw mat on the bare floor, the drafting table with the fluorescent lamp and Rapidograph pens. He soon moved in downstairs. By day, he worked at his father’s coat company in Queens and part time at his uncle’s dry-cleaning business. By night, he consorted with Cage’s remarkable network of artistic acquaintances, the painters and the poets and the artists without portfolio. The painters attracted Feldman the most, and the interest was mutual. Pollock asked him to write music for the famous Hans Namuth documentary about the drip-painting process. Philip Guston immortalized Feldman in a portrait that depicts him with a cigarette jutting from his mouth. “What was great about the fifties,” Feldman later said, “is that for one brief moment—maybe, say, six weeks—nobody understood art.” Cage, in 1950, was turning music upside down. He had written works using found-object percussion, “prepared” pianos, turntables, and other gizmos. Soon to come were tape and radio collages, compositions using chance procedures, multimedia happenings, and “4’ 33”,” the legendary silent piece. But it wasn’t the particulars of Cage’s innovations that affected Feldman; gizmos bored him, and he almost always composed for ordinary instruments, to be played in a more or less ordinary way. What floored Feldman was the unswerving unconventionality of Cage’s mind. He now had permission to drop all inherited habits—to become himself. “I owe him everything and I owe him nothing,” Feldman said. In later years, they had some strong disagreements; Cage would talk about Feldman’s sensuous appeal, which, in his mind, was a problem. In one of history’s more obtuse putdowns, he declared that Feldman’s music was closer “to what we know is beautiful” whereas his own was “closer to what we know is ugly.” Yet the two retained a fraternal bond. Not long after meeting Cage, Feldman opened up his own compositional Pandora’s box, in the form of “graphic notation,” which did away with the routine of writing notes on staves. One day at Cage’s apartment, Feldman produced the first of a series of pieces titled “Projections,” whose score consisted of a grid of boxes. The player was invited to choose notes within the boxes, which represented high, middle, and low ranges. A subsequent series of works, which began appearing in 1957, specified pitches but allowed the performer to decide when and how long they should be played. These conceptual approaches quickly became part of international avant-garde practice, as did Feldman’s habit of using numbered abstractions as titles. Soon enough, composers were filling their scores with patterns, pictures, and verbal instructions, and matters progressed to the logical extreme of Cage’s “Theatre Piece” (1960), during which a piano was slapped with a dead fish. But Feldman had no taste for anarchy. When he realized that his notation could lead to a circus atmosphere—when Leonard Bernstein conducted his music with the New York Philharmonic in 1964, the orchestra joined the audience in hissing him—he turned in another direction. The idea was simply to free music from the machinery of process. Performed in the right spirit, the graphic works sound like the murmur of a crowd in a temple. All the while, Feldman continued to write in traditional notation as well. In pieces entitled “Intermissions” and “Extensions,” he laid out the fundamentals of his aesthetic, which he once defined as vibrating stasis. The sound owed a great deal to the old atonal masters, the Viennese triumvirate of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, especially in their dreamier, eerier moods; Feldman’s music is inconceivable without the precedent of the “Colors” movement of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, with its rotating transpositions of one muted chord, or the funeral march of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, with its misty layers of winds and brass over drum rolls. What Feldman did was to slow the pace of events in the Schoenbergian universe. Schoenberg was, above all, an impatient man, who had to keep scurrying on to the next novel combination of sounds. Feldman was patient. He let each chord say what it had to say. He breathed. Then he moved on to the next. His textures were daringly spare. On one page of “Extensions 3,” he used a mere fifty-seven notes in forty bars, or fewer than two per bar. In confining himself to a minimum of material, Feldman discovered the expressive power of the space around the notes. The sounds animate the surrounding silence. The example of the painters was crucial. Feldman’s scores were close in spirit to Rauschenberg’s all-white and all-black canvases, Barnett Newman’s gleaming lines, and, especially, Rothko’s glowing fog banks of color. His habit of presenting the same figure many times in succession invites you to hear music as a gallery visitor sees paintings; you can study the sound from various angles, stand back or move up close, go away and come back for a second look. Feldman said that New York painting led him to attempt a music “more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore.” Just as the Abstract Expressionists wanted viewers to focus on paint itself, on its texture and pigment, Feldman wanted listeners to absorb the basic facts of resonant sound. At a time when composers were frantically trying out new systems and languages, Feldman choseto follow his intuition. He had an amazing ear for harmony, for ambiguous collections of notes that tease the brain with never-to-be-fulfilled expectations. Wilfrid Mellers, in his book “Music in a New Found Land,” eloquently summed up Feldman’s early style: “Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little that is left is, like all of Feldman’s work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from fear.” In other words, we are in the region of Wallace Stevens’s “American Sublime,” of the “empty spirit / In vacant space.” Working nine to five in the garment business, Feldman proudly maintained his independence from the professional herd. He mocked the university composers who tailored their work for fellow-analysts, the tonal composers who tried to please orchestra audiences, the inventor-composers who unveiled brand-new isms each summer at the state-funded European festivals. “Innovations be damned,” he snapped. “It’s a boring century.” In 1972, he obtained his post at SUNY Buffalo, but he continued to insist that composition could not be taught, that it should not be professionalized. He loved to challenge students’ assumptions about what ideas were au courant, about which composers were radical and which were conservative. He proclaimed, for example, a love for Sibelius, who had long been derided in progressive circles as a retrograde Romantic. When I visited the small archive of Feldman papers at SUNY Buffalo, I came across an exam paper in which the composer asked his students to analyze Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony alongside Webern’s Concerto Opus 24. How the would-be revolutionaries of the day must have scratched their heads over that! Another assignment was to write a piece for soprano and string quartet, using a text from the Buffalo Evening News. Feldman’s works of the seventies were less aggressively strange than those of the fifties and sixties. He sought out warmer, simpler chords, bewitching fragments of melody. Music of this period—the viola-and-ensemble cycle “The Viola in My Life”; a series of concertolike pieces for cello, piano, oboe, and flute; the choral masterwork “Rothko Chapel”—provides a good introduction to a sometimes forbidding sound-world. (“Rothko Chapel” has been recorded immaculately on the New Albion label; for “The Viola in My Life,” wait for an ECM CD next year.) In 1977, Feldman ventured to write an hour-long opera entitled “Neither,” which was destined never to make it to the Met. The libretto was by Samuel Beckett, who had identified Feldman as a kindred spirit, and it consisted of an eighty-seven-word poem that offered no setting, no characters, and no plot, but still the faint assurance of an “unspeakable home.” In his last years, from 1979 until 1987, Feldman again swerved away from the mainstream. He inaugurated his compositions of long duration, those which went on for an hour or more. Even the most devoted fans may wish to admit that there was an element of runaway grandiosity in these Wagnerian demands on the listener’s time. Feldman plotted his immortality with some deliberation—this was the man who intended to become the first great Jewish composer, ruling out Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg—and he evidently saw this series of pieces as his tour de force, his run for home. (“I’m on third base,” he boasted in 1982.) Yet there was also a practical need for a drastic enlargement of scale. It allowed his quiet voice to be heard in the total isolation that it required. Feldman’s shorter works make an awkward effect on standard concert programs, particularly when the audience coughs and rustles its puzzlement aloud; they don’t play well with others. The long works create an overarching, protective space around a vulnerable huddle of sounds. The composer Kyle Gann, in his brilliant new book, “Music Downtown” (California; $19.95), describes how you end up living with Feldman’s music as you would with a painting on your wall. Extreme length allowed Feldman to approach his ultimate goal of making music into an experience of life-changing force, a transcendent art form that wipes everything else away. To sit through performances of the two biggest works—I heard Petr Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble play the five-hour-long “For Philip Guston” in 1995, with phenomenal purity of tone, and the Flux Quartet play the six-hour-long “String Quartet (II)” in 1999, with tireless focus—is to enter into a new way of listening, even a new consciousness. There are passages in each where Feldman seems to be testing the listener’s patience, seeing how long we can endure a repeated note or a dissonant minor second. Then, out of nowhere, some very pure, almost childlike idea materializes. Most of the closing section of “For Philip Guston” is in modal A minor, and it is music of surpassing gentleness and tenderness. But it inhabits a far-off, secret place that few travellers will stumble upon. In his last years, Feldman became unexpectedly wealthy. He inherited some money from his family, and he received increasing royalties from Europe, where his music was always better understood. Most significantly, he made a small fortune by selling art. Back in the fifties, he had bought a Rauschenberg canvas for seventeen dollars, because that was what he had in his pocket at the time. Shortly before his death, he sold it for six hundred thousand dollars. He became a collector of antique Middle Eastern rugs, whose subtly varied patterns affected his late style. Curmudgeonly and generous by turns, he picked up dinner tabs for hungry young composers. His final works radiate an enormous, ominous serenity: “Piano and String Quartet” (which Aki Takahashi has recorded beautifully with the Kronos Quartet, on Nonesuch), “Palais de Mari,” for piano (played by Takahashi on her mesmerizing Mode CD of early and late piano music), and “Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello” (recorded with icy clarity by the Ives Ensemble, on Hat Art). That piece, the very last, makes repeated, wistful references to Debussy’s Prelude “Des Pas sur la Neige,” or “Steps in the Snow.” Pancreatic cancer took Feldman quickly. One day, he was unavoidably there, monopolizing the room; the next, he was gone. There is no mistaking the lonely, lamenting tone that runs through Feldman’s music. From time to time, the composer hinted that the horrors of the twentieth century, and in particular the Holocaust, had made other, more ornate kinds of musical expression impossible for him. He explained that the title “The King of Denmark,” which he bestowed on a graphic piece for percussion, was inspired by King Christian X, who was occupying the Danish throne when the Germans invaded his country in 1940. Feldman proceeded to tell the story, now considered apocryphal, of King Christian responding to German anti-Semitism by walking the streets with a yellow star pinned to his chest. It was a “silent protest,” Feldman said. In a way, his music seemed to protest all of European civilization, which, in one way or another, had been complicit in Hitler’s crimes. The American composer Alvin Curran once saw Feldman at a German festival, and asked him, in light of the enthusiasm that he was inspiring there, why he didn’t move to Germany. Feldman stopped in the middle of the street, pointed down at the cobblestones, and said, “Can’t you hear them? They’re screaming! Still screaming out from under the pavements!” If there is a Holocaust memorial in Feldman’s work, it is “Rothko Chapel,” which was written in 1971, for Rothko’s octagonal array of paintings in Houston. Rothko had committed suicide the previous year, and Feldman, who had become his close friend, responded with his most personal, affecting work. It is scored for viola, solo soprano, chorus, percussion, and celesta. There are voices, but no words. As is so often the case in Feldman’s music, chords and melodic fragments hover like shrouded forms, surrounded by thick silence. The viola offers wide-ranging, rising-and-falling phrases. The drums roll and tap at the edge of audibility. Celesta and vibraphone chime gentle clusters. There are fleeting echoes of past music, as when the chorus sings distant, dissonant chords reminiscent of the voice of God in Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” or when the soprano sings a thin, quasi-tonal melody that echoes the vocal lines of Stravinsky’s final masterpiece, the “Requiem Canticles.” That passage was written on the day of Stravinsky’s funeral, in April, 1971—another thread of lament in the pattern. But the emotional sphere of “Rothko Chapel” is too vast to be considered a memorial for an individual, whether it is Rothko or Stravinsky. Shortly before the end, something astonishing happens. The viola begins to play a keening, minor-key, modal song, redolent of the synagogue. Feldman had written this music decades earlier, during the Second World War, when he was attending the High School of Music and Art, in New York. Underneath it, celesta and vibraphone play a murmuring four-note pattern, which calls to mind a figure in Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.” The song unfurls twice, and the chorus answers with the chords of God. The allusions suggest that Feldman is creating a divine music, appropriate to the sombre spirituality of Rothko’s chapel. In a sense, he is fusing two different divinities, representative of two major strains in twentieth-century music: the remote, Hebraic God of Schoenberg’s opera, and the luminous, iconic presence of Stravinsky’s symphony. Finally, there is the possibility that the melody itself, that sweet, sad, Jewish-sounding tune, speaks for those whom Feldman heard beneath the cobblestones of German towns. It might be the chant of millions in a single voice. But I can almost hear Feldman speaking out against this too specific reading. At a seminar in Germany in 1972, he was asked whether his music had any relationship to the Holocaust, and he said no. He was a hard-core avant-gardist to the end, despite his sensualist tendencies, and he would not freely admit to any such sentimentality. It was probably in reaction to the communicative power of “Rothko Chapel” that he later dismissed it, unbelievably, as a minor work. But in that German seminar he did say, in sentences punctuated by long pauses, “There’s an aspect of my attitude about being a composer that is like mourning. Say, for example, the death of art . . . something that has to do with, say, Schubert leaving me.” He also admitted, “I must say, you did bring up something that I particularly don’t want to talk about publicly, but I do talk privately.” Only this one time, in the last minutes of “Rothko Chapel,” did Feldman allow himself the consolation of an ordinary melody. Otherwise, he held the outside world at bay. Yet he always showed an awareness of other possibilities, a sympathy for all that he chose to reject. Listening to his music is like being in a room with the curtains drawn. You sense that with one quick gesture sunlight could fill the room, that life in all its richness could come flooding in. But the curtains stay closed. A shadow moves across the wall. And Feldman sits in his comfortable chair. http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/06/digital_morty.html

well...Organissimo forum didn't go missing for months.

Here is an actual Onion piece on a jazz box set: Five-Disc Jazz Anthology Still Unopened June 11, 2003 | Issue 39•22 LOUISVILLE, KY—A five-disc jazz-anthology box set, lovingly assembled to give novices an appreciation and understanding of the uniquely American art form, remains unopened nearly two years after its purchase, sources reported Monday. Classic!

Sounds interesting.

Yes. .

Imagine what kind of crap his local record store had to put up with over the years. .

I try not to hold it against you. I like the Capt. I don't listen to him that much any more. Not like I used to.