7/4

Sorry I couldn't make the Trenton gig, I had something else going down. How is Trenton these days? Joe's Mill Hill Saloon is in (or was) a pretty nasty neighborhood. .

I should be able to borrow a copy to check it out. I'm at least curious. .

Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital By Joe BavierTue Apr 22, 1:24 PM ET Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft. Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur. Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings. Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure. "You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday. Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released. "I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said. "But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said. Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members. "It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

I'm listening to WKCR right now. It should be an all day birthday broadcast. .

Hey, take it easy...keep your clothes on. We don't need to see the pasties.

Bumping a thread after an hour and twenty min.? Maybe you need to look for an answer somewhere else if you need an answer that quick.

I feel privileged.

Magnitude-4.5 aftershock reported from Midwest earthquake 1 hour, 1 minute ago A strong aftershock shook Southern Illinois on Monday, three days after a magnitude 5.2 quake rattled the region. Geologists say the temblor just before 12:40 a.m. registered 4.5 magnitude at its epicenter about 5 miles northwest of Mount Carmel. The location is in the same area as Friday's early morning earthquake, which shook a wide area of the Midwest and caused minor damage. The Monday morning aftershock was the 18th since Friday and the second strongest, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The strongest was a 4.6 magnitude shaker about 5 1/2 hours after the original quake Friday morning.

Record Stores Fight to Be Long-Playing In Princeton, an Offline Haven for Music Shoppers Thrives Record Store Day

previous thread

Wow. RIP.

exactly... People tried to tell me he was smiling like that because he's gay, but I said, like, no way, he's really high on drugs and what do you know it turns out that's exactly what was going on...he was always high on drugs...he was, I read it on the internet and it was on the news, so it must be true, he was always high on drugs.

KINKY NEWS NETWORK By DAREH GREGORIAN and PHILIP MESSING April 19, 2008 -- This is CNN? Kinky! CNN personality Richard Quest was busted in Central Park early yesterday with some drugs in his pocket, a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals, and a sex toy in his boot, law-enforcement sources said. Quest, 46, was arrested at around 3:40 a.m. after a cop spotted him and another man inside the park near 64th Street, a police source said. The criminal complaint against Quest said the park was closed at the time - something Quest should have known because of all the signs saying "Park Closed 1 a.m. to 6 a.m." Quest was initially busted for loitering, the source said. Aside from the oddly configured rope, the search also turned up a sex toy inside of his boot, and a small bag of methamphetamine in his left jacket pocket. It wasn't immediately clear what the rope was for. The criminal complaint says the officer at the scene was able to ID the drug because of "his prior experience as a police officer in drug arrests, observation of packaging which is characteristic of this type of drug, and defendant's statements that . . . 'I've got some meth in my pocket.' " He was charged with loitering and criminal possession of a controlled substance. His unusual get-up didn't lead to a lewdness charge because he wasn't exposing himself, the police source said. Quest's unidentified companion was given a summons for not carrying any identification, the source said. Quest's lawyer, Alan Abramson, had a much more innocuous version of events. "Mr. Quest didn't realize that the park had a curfew," Abramson said. He was simply "returning to his hotel with friends." At a hearing in Manhattan Criminal Court, Quest agreed to undergo six months of drug counseling in return for an "adjournment in contemplation of dismissal," which means the misdemeanor charges against him will be dropped and the case sealed if he stays out of trouble and completes his drug program. He was released with no bail after spending most of the day behind bars. Abramson predicted after the hearing that "the case will be dismissed." He declined to answer questions. Quest, known for his hollering antics and stunts on the cable news network and its international counterpart, declined comment, as did a CNN spokeswoman. On his official CNN bio, the network calls him "one of the most instantly recognizable members of the CNN team." "He has become one of the network's highest profile presenters," and his "dynamic and distinctive style has made him a unique figure in the field of business and news broadcasting," the network's Web site says. He was reportedly once offered a position for the English-language version of the controversial Al Jazeera network, but said he turned it down because being gay and Jewish, he didn't think it would be a good fit.

I don't think it was all about the curfew. He could have gotten a hotel room. .

That was pretty nimble.

I knew it. I always thought he was a speed freak. Something about that expression on his face... I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.

April 20, 2008 George Butler, Executive at Prominent Jazz Labels, Is Dead at 76 By BEN RATLIFF George Butler, a prominent jazz record executive for the Columbia, Blue Note and United Artists labels from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, died on April 9 in Castro Valley, Calif. He was 76. His death was confirmed by his sister, Jacqueline Butler Hairston. Mr. Butler was best known for working to make jazz recordings dovetail with trends in popular music in the 1970s and 1980s, and for helping to encourage the Young Lions movement that began in the ’80s, when Wynton Marsalis and other neo-traditionalists became stars. Mr. Butler was a famously natty presence on the jazz scene. He lived in New York City for decades, but by October 2005, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, he had moved to a retirement home in Hayward, Calif. Born and raised in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Butler attended Howard University and received a master’s degree in music education from Teachers College at Columbia University. (The “Dr.” title he frequently used came from an honorary doctorate given to him by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.) After a few years at United Artists Records, he moved to a subsidiary label, Blue Note, in 1972. At a time when jazz was rapidly losing its audience, he strove to fight the trend by arranging for many jazz-pop crossover projects, including albums by Earl Klugh, Donald Byrd, Ronnie Laws and Bobbi Humphrey. He also oversaw projects for records with a few musicians who had been at the forefront of jazz in the early ’60s, including Horace Silver and Bobby Hutcherson. In the late ’70s Mr. Butler was hired by Columbia, where he became vice president for jazz and progressive artists and repertory. During his tenure there, which lasted into the mid-’90s, he helped persuade Miles Davis to return to the studio (in 1980, after a five-year absence). He also signed or was executive producer for fusion and soul-jazz acts like Bob James, Billy Cobham and Grover Washington Jr. Mr. Butler was instrumental in signing Wynton Marsalis to Columbia. Mr. Butler and Columbia soon became a nexus for the Young Lions, young musicians playing hard bop or traditional styles with polished technique. He was the executive producer of albums by others who were presented in the same vein, like Branford Marsalis (Wynton Marsalis’s brother), Kent and Marlon Jordan, Terence Blanchard and Donald Harrison. While at Columbia, he also signed Harry Connick Jr. and Nnenna Freelon. In addition to his sister, Ms. Hairston, of Hayward, Calif., Mr. Butler is survived by his daughter, Bethany Butler of Manhattan.

Blackbird virtuosos need no visuals Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic Monday, April 14, 2008 In addition to playing their instruments like demons, members of the phenomenal new-music sextet, Eighth Blackbird, often incorporate stage movement into their performances. At its best, the group dispatches intricate and demanding scores - generally from memory - while supplementing the music with elegant visual counterpoint. But there's movement and movement. Much of "Singing in the Dead of Night," a new 50-minute piece that the group introduced in Herbst Theatre on Saturday night, felt like first-rate music that had been cluttered up with all sorts of intrusive gimmickry and half-hearted stage crosses. This is what happens, I suppose, when an innovative idea becomes a signature. Next stop: shtick. "Singing in the Dead of Night" (the title, though not as far as I could tell any of the musical material, comes from the Lennon/McCartney classic "Blackbird") was commissioned from the three founding artistic directors of the New York new music festival Bang on a Can. The composers - David Lang (who last week won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Little Match Girl Passion"), Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe - decided to incorporate Eighth Blackbird's stage moves into the new piece. So they divvied up the five individual movements of the work and enlisted choreographer Susan Marshall to add some theatrical business to the mix. It's hard to know who was responsible for which elements of the result, which vacillated between inspired high jinks and tiresome performance-art cliches. Some of the stage maneuvers seemed crudely pasted onto the music ("Play over here - now go play over there"); others were more deeply integrated. But none of it was as subtle or nuanced as some of the simple physical patterns that the group uses as visual counterpoint. And all of it drew attention to itself, relentlessly and often unrewardingly. How many times, after all, can you watch a musician pour a bucket of sand onto a table and sweep it onto the floor before the effect wanes? If you guessed "once," you've overshot the mark. The one movement that took full advantage of the stage was Gordon's "The Light of the Dark," a zestful, witty scherzo in which the performers took turns offering brisk melodic solos like the members of some kind of traveling band. At the heart of the movement was a distinctive musical punctuation mark, a loud metallic clang from the percussion extended by a long sustained chord from the accordion. That striking musical gesture marked each quick shift in tone, and every time it raised an excited laugh; the one time it didn't arrive on cue created a brilliant comic gem. Lang's three contributions sounded vivid and engaging - the jittery, offbeat dance of the Epilogue in particular sent listeners home pleasantly jazzed up - but they also had the least to do with any theatrical components. The effect of most of the music would have been the same, if not clearer, simply played straight. That's especially true given the ferocious virtuosity of the group's members, flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri, violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos, percussionist Matthew Duvall and pianist Lisa Kaplan. There seems to be nothing they can't do, musically or otherwise. The short first half of Saturday's program, sponsored by San Francisco Performances, was devoted to Steve Reich's "Double Sextet," written last year for the group. Like much of Reich's music, it involves a twinned ensemble - the members of Eighth Blackbird playing in conjunction with their pre-recorded selves - and it trades in the composer's familiar interlocking rhythms and cyclical harmonies. A bad sound mix delivered the first of the piece's three movements at punishingly loud volume. But there was evidently a midcourse correction, because the remainder of the piece sounded terrific, mournful and tender in the central slow movement and densely athletic in the finale.

REVIEW: Eighth Blackbird April 11, 2008 13:48PM Susan Isaacs Nisbett Ann Arbor News Special Writer It's not often that a classical music group plays two shows in a night. But then, it's not often that you find a group like the willing, wild and daring Eighth Blackbird, the contemporary music sextet that offered two kinetically charged concerts at Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre Thursday evening, under University Musical Society auspices. I caught the first, 7 p.m. set of this double-your-fun evening, which like its 9:30 p.m. twin consisted of two new works composed for the group: Steve Reich's "Double Sextet" and a UMS co-commission by Bang On A Can composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, "singing in the dead of night," with stage direction by choreographer Susan Marshall and lighting by Matthew Land. The choreography in the Reich was all aural, and all dazzling, as the players - flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri, violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos, percussionist Matthew Duval and pianist Lisa Kaplan - assembled minimalist musical figures and lines as they played live against a recording of themselves in a complementary sextet. The interplay and the sonorities are incredibly intricate and thrilling, and not just when Kaplan's piano and Duval's vibraphone drive the show with blazing ostinati; the sextet's slow middle section is haunting and hypnotic. Wit and whimsy - plus virtuoso performance and a whole lot of moving going on - are the calling cards of "singing in the dead of night," an essay in serious fun in which accordions and harmonicas make cameo appearances. Wolfe's section, which gives the work its title, is a little long on Marshall's choreographed fun-with-pails-of-sand interludes. But the soundscapes are captivating there and in Gordon's "light of the dark" music and Lang's "broken wings" sections - elfin music to start, drooping scales to continue, and puckish, pixilated pep to finish.

Nice...thanks! .

Scientists say Midwest quakes poorly understood By DAVID MERCER, Associated Press WriterSat Apr 19, 9:56 AM ET Scientists say they know far too little about Midwestern seismic zones like the one that rumbled to life under southern Illinois Friday morning, but some of what they do know is unnerving. The fault zones beneath the Mississippi River Valley have produced some of the largest modern U.S. quakes east of the Rockies, a region covered with old buildings not built to withstand seismic activity. And, when quakes happen, they're felt far and wide, their vibrations propagated over hundreds of miles of bedrock. Friday's quake shook things up from Nebraska to Atlanta, rattling nerves but doing little damage and seriously hurting no one. It was a magnitude 5.2 temblor centered just outside West Salem in southeastern Illinois, a largely rural region of small towns that sit over the Wabash fault zone. The area has produced moderately strong quakes as recently as 2002. But it hasn't been studied to nearly the degree of quake-prone areas west of the Rockies, particularly along the heavily scrutinized Pacific coast. "We don't have as many opportunities as in California," said Genda Chen, associate professor of engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, which sits near the well-known and very active New Madrid fault zone. "We cannot even borrow on the knowledge they learn on the West Coast" because quakes that happen in California — where tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface collide — are so different from Midwestern quakes that happen far away from the edges of the nearest plates. It isn't entirely clear, for instance, whether the Wabash faults are related to the New Madrid faults or not. Some scientists say they are related, noting that the Wabash faults, which roughly parallel the river of the same name in southern Illinois and Indiana, are a northern extension of the New Madrid zone. Others say they're not. The New Madrid fault zone produced a series of quakes in 1811 and 1812 that reached an estimated magnitude 7.0, putting them among the strongest known quakes to have occurred east of the Rockies. The quakes changed the course of the Mississippi River and were felt in New England. That distance of well over a thousand miles sounds impressive, but experts say quakes that happen in the Midwest commonly radiate out for hundreds of miles because of the bedrock beneath much of the eastern United States. "Our bedrock here is old, really rigid and sends those waves a long way," said Bob Bauer, a geologist with the Illinois State Geological Survey who works in Champaign. He compared the underground rock, which in much of the Midwest lies anywhere from a few thousand feet to just a few feet below the earth's surface, to a bell that very efficiently transmits seismic waves like sound. "California is young bedrock," he explained. "It's broken up ... like a cracked bell. You ring that, the waves don't go as far." The question of whether Friday's quake was centered along a branch of the New Madrid zone or not is of more than academic interest. The area even now produces smaller, very regular quakes, and experts say it still has the potential to produce a quake that could devastate the region. The Wabash faults have the potential to do the same, at least based on distant history, said Columbia University seismologist Won-Young Kim. The strongest quake produced in recent history by the Wabash was a magnitude 5.3 in southern Illinois in 1968, but researchers have found evidence that 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, much stronger quakes shook the region, Kim said, as strong as magnitude 7.0 or more. A similar quake is still possible, if the region is given time to build up enough energy, Kim said. But knowledge about the area is too thin to say whether that's likely, he added.

April 19, 2008 Music Review | Eighth Blackbird A Night of Collaboration and Energetic Activity By ALLAN KOZINN, NYT You can measure a new-music group’s success by the composers it commissions. When Eighth Blackbird began performing, in 1996, its repertory consisted largely of revivals of older scores and works by young composers in the early stages of their careers. The group has not forsaken those composers, nor has it given up curatorial programming completely, but the program it played at Zankel Hall on Thursday evening showed that it is now in another league. All the music was commissioned by the group, with the first half devoted to the vigorous “Double Sextet” (2007) by Steve Reich and the second to “Singing in the Dead of Night” (2008), an energetic and occasionally spooky collaboration by David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, the composers who run Bang on a Can. Mr. Reich’s work is the latest in his series of scores for two or more soloists — or, in this case, ensembles. The players have the choice of performing all the parts onstage or recording one set and playing the rest live. Most musicians take the second option, as Eighth Blackbird did: in any case the spirit of these works is bound up in the juxtaposition of real players and their simulacra. The “Double Sextet” begins with Mr. Reich’s signature chugging rhythms but quickly moves a fair distance, as intricate rhythmic counterpoint and thickening harmonies displace the repetitive opening figure. Parts of the score are almost episodic, with distinct shifts of mood set apart by percussive full stops. In one fleeting passage a lyrical violin-cello duet over a hazy accompaniment sounded like a lightly distorted glimpse into a 19th-century European ballroom. That didn’t last long: Mr. Reich’s insistent rhythms quickly returned, restoring the work to its contemporary moorings. “Singing in the Dead of Night” is the overall title for the works by Mr. Lang (“These Broken Wings”), Mr. Gordon (“The Light of the Dark”) and Ms. Wolfe (“Singing in the Dead of Night”), and it offers a choice as well: the pieces can be played separately or, as they were here, in a unified 50-minute production. The titles are all taken from the Beatles’ song “Blackbird,” but the tune itself is not quoted. Instead, Mr. Lang provides a three-movement work with virtuosic and sometimes subtly comic outer movements and a slow, eerie middle section. Mr. Gordon’s and Ms. Wolfe’s scores, interposed among these movements, in some ways match their impulses. Mr. Gordon’s piece continues the rambunctiousness of Mr. Lang’s opening movement, upping the ante by having the musicians play additional instruments, including accordion and harmonica, usually with an aggressive edge. And Ms. Wolfe’s work expands on the melancholy edge of Mr. Lang’s middle movement, gradually picking up speed, heft and lyricism. The performance, virtuosic, polished and played largely from memory, was choreographed by Susan Marshall with an amusing quirkiness that reflected the music’s energy.

April 20, 2008 Music Rocketing to Inner Space, Defying Tonality By BERNARD HOLLAND, NYT Twelve-tone tonalist: George Perle, a dozen of whose compositions are on a new CD set, at home in Manhattan. GEORGE PERLE, who turns 93 next month, is a rare survivor of a disappearing movement. The general public will barely notice its departure, given that not many people know it ever existed. Mr. Perle belongs to a second generation of explorers. I doubt there will be a third. It is not a question of quality. His atonal compositions, 12 of which are collected in a two-CD retrospective on the Bridge label, are like well-cut jewelry: small enough to hold in the hand, diamond hard yet smooth to the touch, and shining with reflecting light. I admire Mr. Perle’s music, although I can’t say I like it very much. He speaks a language he and his contemporaries made up. I can speak only the languages I was born to. Sometimes I feel guilty. Maybe I should work harder at his grammar and vocabulary. With age I feel guilty less and less. How did all this atonality business start? A number of 20th-century composers said that it was the necessary next step, that old ways of listening had worn themselves out. It sounds reasonable to say that Anton Webern’s Piano Variations take up where Brahms left off. I admire the Webern; I even like it for its strangely satisfying space-age spirituality. I don’t think it has anything remotely to do with Brahms. The Webern, and music that constitutes Mr. Perle’s immediate heritage, is altogether new. It is as if music history in the mid-1920s had stopped dead in its tracks and started again from scratch. Composers of the Second Viennese School — Arnold Schoenberg, Webern and, to a degree, Alban Berg — were like mutineers against the divine right of tonal music. Serialism was their Pitcairn Island. Freedom to reinvent was one result, inbreeding another. Until the 20th century musicians obeyed natural laws of physics. Pick up a rock, drop it, and it falls to the ground. Music was the same. Send a piece of music up in the air, doctor and twist it, make it major, minor or modal; in the end it wants to come down to where it started. You can call the process tonality or music’s law of gravity. The Nine Bagatelles for piano (played in the CD set by Horacio Gutiérrez), from 1999, and the Serenade No. 3 for piano and chamber orchestra (with Richard Goode and Gerard Schwarz conducting the Music Today Ensemble), from 1983, both have Mr. Perle’s trademark love for brief, elegant, highly energized phrases separated by marked pauses. Cleanliness and light are present: Art Deco streamlining replaces Edwardian overdecoration. If Mr. Perle is a jeweler, he is also an architect, and you can think of these pieces as buildings. We admire them for clear thinking and precision. Still, not many people want to live in them. It is interesting that Mr. Perle’s take on 12-tone music flourished just as space travel was coming along. He and eminent colleagues like Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter were our musical astronauts. They defied gravity and left Mother Earth behind. Music soared into space. Out there in the ether a minor second would sound just as peaceful as a major third. Laws were necessary, for with everything now possible, nothing was possible. Schoenberg escaped the chaos of limitless choice with a system whereby the appearance and frequency of certain pitches followed a rational design, one that included turning rows of notes upside down, running them back to front and the like. Mr. Perle’s music thinks in a similar way but invents its own homing devices or tonal centers. It all sounds suspiciously like the 14th century, one of the blackest moments in human civilization and a period that produced reams of musical counterpoint surreal in its density. It may not be overly fanciful to compare the Black Death to AIDS, or the three-dimensional musical crossword puzzles of monkish scholars to the Babbitt Piano Concerto that so bewildered audiences and critics at Carnegie Hall a few years ago. Postwar prosperity helps explain how a musical style attracted so much attention and yet was listened to by practically nobody. As academia and cultural foundations flourished, composers could write music to please themselves and one another and still make a living. Unappreciated genius and the consolations of posterity were conveniently popular conceits. American fascination with science and engineering and disgust for a tired European tradition made serial music and other rule-bound procedures a great new adventure. As with space travel, its practitioners were select and its methodology graspable by a chosen few. Listening to recent Perle pieces like “Brief Encounters” for string quartet (the DePaul String Quartet) and the “Triptych for Solo Violin and Piano” (Curtis Macomber and Christopher Oldfather) I find admirable sophistication applied to a language I do not choose to speak. Mr. Perle has an honored place in music, but a narrow one. His pieces also raise what has become a confusing question: What do classical composers writing music like this expect from listeners? The old simple answer was fame — the wider the better — and finally the blessings of posterity. I can’t pretend to get inside Mr. Perle’s head, and I’m sure all of us secretly yearn for greatness, but I cannot believe that he has ever seriously hoped for wide embrace. I recently came across a television program about Mr. Carter, who, at the end, hoped that an increasingly complicated world would breed a public smart and alert enough to appreciate his music. That is a dangerous presumption, one that offers soap to an unwashed public as yet unworthy of his greatness. Afterward I went back to George Perle on Bridge. The air seemed just as rarefied as before but somehow healthier to breathe.