7/4

Jim Sauter interview wiki Trouser Press

Best experienced live. I heard them at the Knit once. Pretty damm loud. Donald Miller, I've heard many times. http://www.borbetomagus.com

Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis In Conversation

I made a post of the same information in the What "classical" music are you listening to right now? thread, but it's such an amazing album, I wanted to mention it here also. Iannis Xenakis - Electronic Music

OTOH, have you considered that in fact Britney is "role-playing" the ten thousandth performance of "child star achieves great success, can't handle it, descends into booze & drug pit of despair"? Sure, that's a given. But not my point. OK, and my reaction to the fascination with Brit doesn't have anything to do with "conformity" or enjoying someone "pay the price" but rather that it is nothing other than the same instinct to rubber-neck at the site of a car wreck. Apparently, it's more of a medical issue than a "booze & drug pit of despair".

Primal Architect By Ben Watson Since the death in 1965 of Edgard Varèse - the sole composer to translate Futurism into sound - all classical music has sounded disappointed, vitiated as an artistic force by its social role as an emblem of high-grade cultural 'value'. Snob appeal does not encourage recognition of the realities modern life. Of all the composers now operating within the parameters of art music, the one who has attempted to further Varèse's project most has been Iannis Xenakis. Almost uniquely, Xenakis adheres to the tenets of 1920s abstraction: insistence on the here-and-now of the material artwork; trust in an egalitarian human psyche addressable by primal signs; an overriding concern with innovation ("I try not to repeat myself. I am not interested in repeating myself, or other people's music"). All of which adds up to a blunt refusal of ideological or cultural collusion. Though the force and directness of his music is acknowledged even by conservative critics. Xenakis's vast oeuvre - over 100 fullblown works by 1993 - suffers terrible neglect. His rationalist intransigence, his insistence on hearing the music he wants, resists the marketing cliches, the conformist niches like 'mystic seer' or 'national treasure' or 'soundtrack maestro'. Xenakis was born in Braïla, Romania on 22 May 1922. During the Second World War, he joined the Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation at the age of 18. I met him in London on the day that the scandal of the Churchill papers hit the headlines, and Xenakis told a story that served as a rebuff to the jingoistic celebrations being planned for VE day. In October 1944, with the fascists beaten, Xenakis and his resistance comrades found themselves fighting a new set of invaders - British troops ordered by Churchill to suppress the Communist-led partisans and secure Greece for the West. Unarmed civilian demonstrators were shot down in the street, and Xenakis fled to Paris in 1947 under sentence of death from the new regime, an American-backed oscillation between authoritarian monarchy and military dictatorship which lasted until the mid-70s. In the fight against the British, part of the left half of Xenakis's face was shot away; he only survived due to the heroism of a woman called Mâkhi (after whom he named his only daughter). But his experiences also had musical import. Just as Varèse - with his sirens, percussive blocks of sound and cataclysmic climaxes - made music cognisant of the realities of trench warfare, so Xenakis was fascinated by the noise of crowds and of gunshot sounds in space. "I discovered things about sound that I was not taught, that no one had told me. People shouting in waves, it's a very special experience. I was there in December 1944 when the Communist resistance was suppressed by the British troops. I was fighting against the British as I fought against the Germans. What was interesting were the bullets in the night, whistling, and explosions here and there, and also the searchlights trying to spot the planes - that was with the Germans. It was a large-scale spectacle that was very interesting." Such aestheticisation of war and suffering has a sinister side, though with Xenakis it has more to do with a strict idea of the objectivity of musical event than contempt for the suffering of the masses. In order to make music that could apply his observations, Xenakis needed to master traditional technique: in Paris he studied music with Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and Olivier Messiaen. He also worked for the architect Le Corbusier and (along with Varèse) supplied tapes for the Philips multi-speaker pavilion at the World Fair in Brussels in 1958. He developed an interest in maths, a discipline of relevance to both music and architecture, especially the 'calculus of probabilities' pioneered in the early eighteenth century by Jacques Bernouilli. Xenakis used Bernouilli's 'stochastic' method (the word means 'target', and refers to the gradual accumulation of definition in calculating probabilities - the more you flip the coin, the closer you get to 50 per cent) to assign notes to players, distributing huge 'events' across the orchestra. This was an eminently reasonable way to plot the movement of sounds, as logical yet tradition-defying as the Neo-Plasticist painters' elimination of everything from their canvases apart from black, white, the right-angle and the primary colours (during the interview, Xenakis talked approvingly of the artist Piet Mondrian). The stochastic method enabled Xenakis to emulate the unpredictable-yet-patterned forms found in tree branches, clouds and coastlines (anticipating popular interest in Chaos Theory by 40 years). "The stochastic method was necessary in the 50s, when I started writing Metastasis or Pithoprakta especially. I used systems that scattered formal notes from the string orchestra all over the spectrum. That was the vision that I had of music like the rain, or like the clouds - and the human mind is made out of these things, so it was not a translation, but a personification of these kind of thoughts." Early on, Xenakis did himself an unwitting disservice by trying to explain such mathematical procedures in interviews. He was branded with a reputation for formidable intellectualism when his real aim was to evoke primal experiences. As so often in classical music, the fact that his sensibility was alien to genteel concertgoers was held as evidence of elitism - actually he deserved the audiences that were later wowed by the (comparatively impoverished) sight-and-sound spectacles of Hawkwind or Jean Michel Jarre. "It has to be music otherwise you are lost. The imagination of what you put in art can be very close to what scientists find out in mathematics or astro-physics, but if you fall into the trap that you must bring mathematics into music, then you are lost, it is impossible. Of course I made mistakes, I don't know where, but I did make mistakes, thinking that this mathematical logic is interesting in itself, but it has to be separated. I have from very early on developed a sense of sound, as opposed to the ideological principles that you could put inside. Music has to be sound, otherwise you are lost. Sound goes into the inner part of the human soul - in a more powerful way even than painting." When I met him, Xenakis was visiting London to hear the ensemble Reservoir perform his 1969 composition, Kraanerg. Its densely-packed 75 minutes pits brass and the lowest of woodwinds (including bassoon and the rarely heard contra-bass clarinet) against a ferocious four-track tape montage. The mere timbre of the piece was spell-bindingly alien. Its lizard skin crawls with lurid life; like Ridley Scott, Xenakis grasps that immaculate attention to detail is required to make a monster movie in the mind. And although its texture is ruggedly distinctive, exposure to the whole piece revealed an astonishing variety of formal inventions. During our conversation, it became obvious why Xenakis could not use the record industry to teach a non-classical audience: he retains the classical composer's focus on site-specific sonic events. Recorded product does not interest him. I showed him one of the 3" mini-CDs in the Metamkine label's Cinéma Pour L'Oreille series, which provides a showcase for state-of-the-art electroacoustic compositions: Xenakis's wonderful, hard-to-find electronic music would be perfect for the label. However, for Xenakis, a tape is a way of realising concerts, not an article for private consumption - and still less a priceless artwork. The tape for Kraanerg, for example, is administered alongside his instrumental score sheets by the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes. At 1am on the morning of the performance, it was discovered that the master tape was in Sydney, Australia. A digital copy was quickly transmitted over the Internet to London for Reservoir's performance. Xenakis, meanwhile, remained blissfully ignorant of the drama surrounding his work. Xenakis conceives of recordings as a means to realise specific events. "It depends on the acoustical means to listen to the music, what loudspeakers you have, what hall, the acoustics of the hall - it's a very complicated thing and more or less a failure!" Did he think that domestic reproduction of sound was hopelessly impoverished? "Well, it's not safe. You don't know. It's like having something written for an orchestra and then the orchestra is not so good, the conductor is not so good, the hall is not interesting, and so it's a failure, it's not what you wanted. They are building all sorts of concert halls; sometimes they are acoustically good, the sound coming from the stage can be interesting, most of the time you cannot put loudspeakers on the ceiling, there are no means - if you put them on a balcony that is usually very poor. I have thought and designed concert halls which are different, these things were published somewhere - it is a thing nobody has solved yet." What of virtual recreation of ambience in headphones? "In fact it's rather poor and it doesn't work. You have to make an abstraction when you make a recording, it's not the real acoustics. When you write music you have to have in mind that you'll only hear a sketch of it. You can listen to it, but bear in mind that it is not the absolute thing. There are so many variables. A composer has to judge - that should be about that, this effect, but you are never sure: what you have in your mind is something that is not real. Even the conductor doesn't know. If you have no conductor it's still more difficult - like with the string quartet. With the string quartet if the second violin is not loud enough, then what you have written is lost." If recorded sound is no answer, how can we best hear his music? "I write especially for Germany, for Cologne, Munich, for Hamburg - the best way is to go and listen to these concerts. Why it's Germany, I don't know. Germany is divided in Länders, and so they are independent and try to act for themselves, which does not exist in France or England - it's much less centralised. And perhaps people who commission are wide open, they want something different." Unlike virtually every other composer, Xenakis refuses to worry about the tastes of his audience; he believes any calculation in that arena would render his art inauthentic, a bad cross between art and politics. While his own opinions are radical - a 1967 pamphlet had him praising Lenin as a "philosopher, sociologist and demagogue", while Kraanerg was written to hail the "youth revolt" of 1968 - he wants music to be autonomous and objective, a primal enactment of natural forces. "I write music because I am interested in what I am doing at that time, no matter what happens to it. Fortunately I have a publisher who takes care of it, and there are people who are crazy enough to perform it from time to time, but that is not really my problem. You have to be critical about the music you are doing, and not about the political aspect that is surrounding it - otherwise you are lost, you are not an interesting musician, nor a politician at all. If you want to be performed, maybe you have to be interesting for the listeners; you may think they are not just listeners but also politically minded, which is a mistake. Mankind is... you have the same brain as everybody, so if you do something interesting musically speaking, just that, people can understand that, can grasp it - because they are made as you are, you are not special. Otherwise, for instance, we would not be interested in Japanese music, traditional music, Indian or Chinese musics, which are very apart." [page break] He tells a story of asking an orchestra to listen to a Japanese musician playing Heike (traditional Japanese music) and being disappointed that they laughed at it, wouldn't treat it seriously. Xenakis wishes to reproduce the thrill of responding to forms of art without necessarily learning the code (compare Ezra Pound on Chinese characters, Charles Olson on Mayan glyphs or Anthony Braxton's diagram titles). The creation of new sounds is paramount, rather than a 'conversational' deployment of readily available elements. "The post-Serial musicians like Boulez and Stockhausen and Nono and other people, they thought of music not in that kind of way, that is to transform the sound from the instruments, but just to play the sounds but put in a logical combination of melodic patterns. Varèse on the contrary tried to construct new sounds from the traditional ones by harmonics, not each sound for each instrument but by the combination of the instruments, and he was up to a point quite successful, though he didn't do much after the 30s." This stance has led Xenakis to compositions of astonishing scope. The cello virtuoso Siegfried Palm's recording of a 13 minute piece for unaccompanied cello, Nomos Alpha (1966), introduced a staggering array of new playing techniques and attained the kind of visceral performance intensity associated with jazz and free improvisation. The same year Xenakis completed Terretektorh for 88 musicians distributed among the audience - the wind and percussion players were also equipped with a wood-block, whip, maracas and siren. Xenakis is also noted for his pioneering use of unusual vocal production in choral works - male falsetto, throat clicks and lip smacks. Whether concentrating on a single instrument and its capabilities, or arranging innovative events for massed ensembles, Xenakis maintains the integrity of his music by pursuit of the never-before-heard. This makes all the justifications for retread art - religious or political 'commitment', commercial accessibility, the declared desire to 'communicate' - redundant. Xenakis may be uninterested in social contexts that always lead to 'imperfect' realisations of his musical ideas, but it is important that Reservoir is an ensemble committed to performing Xenakis. Exposure to his music is necessary if one is to gauge the degree of timidity and retreat that has infected art music today. As well as Kraanerg, they have already performed Epei (1976) and Palimpsest (1979) and are planning more in the future. Reservoir packed the Conway Hall for Kraanerg, and the programme - a delirious arrangement of a Carl Stalling Looney Tunes cartoon soundtrack called There They Go Go Go! and a piece by Erik Satie - was 'accessible' enough to attract the punters, but also provided an intelligent contrast to Xenakis (especially Stalling - his exhaustive and dizzying run-through of established emotional triggers provided the perfect foil to Xenakis's rugged refusal to manipulate). Fashionable interest in cartoon frivolity was not used as an excuse to ignore what 75 minutes of 60s modernism could offer: the players' commitment to Xenakis was palpable (other Reservoir composers include Barrett and Braxton, Zappa and Zorn). The performance didn't just vindicate Xenakis, it also vindicated the relevance of classical music to a discussion of new music of any genre: Reservoir are a musical force who can make genuine sense of The Wire's cross-cultural scramble. Although Xenakis is still too little known and too little performed, his example - his willingness to carry compositional strategies beyond the confines of 'good taste', his openness to the untempered impact of exotic musics, his drive for new sounds, the terrifying emotional impact of his sonic objectivity - has inspired younger composers as diverse (yet crucial) as Michael Finnissy, Richard Barrett and Hannah Kulenty. His focus on what can be achieved in site-specific locales has restricted his music to concert halls, denying him his rightful audience. Nevertheless, this narrow focus - in sharp contrast to those 'broadminded' post-minimalists who look over their shoulder at the sales figures achieved in pop/classical crossovers - has allowed Xenakis to develop a music of truly majestic otherness. It is an alien shard, glimmering in the heart of the West. © The Wire 2008

Mode's Xenakis Edition.

Happy Birthday Don Van Vliet.

OTOH, have you considered that in fact Britney is "role-playing" the ten thousandth performance of "child star achieves great success, can't handle it, descends into booze & drug pit of despair"? What's your point?

Music Turned Inside Out Borbetomagus by Kyle Gann, Village Voice October 13 - 19, 1999 Donald Miller of Borbetomagus: a Cagean Hell photo: Carla Gahr If it's true, as I've heard, that there are too many masochists in the world and not enough sadists to go around, that might explain the enthusiastic crowd Borbetomagus drew at Tonic a couple of weeks ago. Not to say that I don't like Borbetomagus, just that they fall into the class of pleasures I can rarely afford to indulge. I used to make a Texas chili so hot that after eating it I couldn't walk the next day (God's truth), and there are some exquisite Polish vodkas to which I bade a tearful goodbye when I turned 40. Similarly, Borbetomagus— as much as I savor the startling fact that they exist at all— are simply too rich for me to take in more often than every 12 years or so. Which is, in fact, how long it had been since I heard them live, and they hadn't played New York in the last two years at all. But they're celebrating their 20-year anniversary as the world's knottiest noise band, and their faithful following were thrilled to don earplugs on the millennium's last summery Saturday afternoon to endure them. They were one person down since the old days, but not a decibel short. Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich draped microphones inside their saxes and blew to their hearts' content, while Donald Miller scraped his electric guitar strings with a file, plied them with e-bows, and slapped at them with assorted objects. Add a floorful of god-knows-what effects units revving up feedback and distortion, and you had a behemoth of a noise-drone passing overhead of which we heard only the rusty underside. Perhaps this is what the world would sound like if you developed an ailment that caused you to hear all sounds at once. On one hand, Borbetomagus's concept is as pure as a La Monte Young drone installation: the superficial effect was a deafening and almost unchanging thickly octaved hum. Within that hum, though, a Cagean hell broke loose: the saxes wailed a vaguely ethnic complaint, roaring noises ripped up and down in counterpoint, raspy pulses added an inconstant beat, even pipe organs seemed to barrel down on us with Phantom of the Opera maliciousness. Focus on the roaring mass, and the inner flux called for your attention; try to isolate an element, and the noise would congeal back into a roar. It's the perfect experience of the Wall of Noise, a paradigm that has attracted little attention in mainstream musical discourse, but has been a Holy Grail in the underground for 30 years. Iannis Xenakis may have been the Wall of Noise pioneer (in Orient-Occident, Bohor), and lots of little-known electronic composers have tried out the idea on tape; Maryanne Amacher is a louder, more recent advocate. Glenn Branca achieved it with electric guitars, but has seemed less interested in it literally than as metaphor, most tellingly in his Symphony No. 9. The conceit is to hear music from the inside, to be so pervaded by the noise that you can't remain separate from it; the total sound mass changes, and you barely notice how. It's a foreground/background reversal, music turned inside out. To make it literal, the noise must be inside your head and unescapable. Only Borbetomagus has dared go that far, and they've been doing it for 20 years. It seemed too classic to not have been planned that a few minutes into the set, smoke began streaming from one of the sound monitors, filling the room with a faint smell, as club personnel rushed to disconnect the smoldering box. The first "set" (actually just a continuous roar) lasted 42 minutes, the second a merciful 15; it differed from the first by seeming to flip more often between high-and low-frequency masses. I sat close up without earplugs for as long as I could stand, then fled to the back for a while, then finally added the earplugs. Like John Cage standing next to the jet engine, I really want the experience, for no other noise has ever been so ineffably complex and multidimensional. Eventually, though, you sacrifice your high- frequency hearing for the pleasure, and I think I'll prefer, for another 12 years now, to simply be glad that Borbetomagus is out there. http://www.villagevoice.com/music/9941,gann,9006,22.html

It's fun to watch celebrity crash and burn, but is it ok? I don't like her as a celebrity, but she has some serious problems...whatever they are. I have friends and relatives with all sorts of problems and it's more of a heartbreak than anything else.

January 14, 2008 Music Industry, Souring on Apple, Embraces Amazon Service By JEFF LEEDS LOS ANGELES — At the Super Bowl next month, the music industry will be switching teams — from Apple to Amazon.com. The major record labels lined up with Pepsi-Cola and Apple four years ago to give away 100 million songs through Apple’s online store, unveiling the promotion in a Super Bowl commercial with music from the band Green Day. The effort helped spread the word about Apple’s iTunes offerings. Pepsi’s promotion is back this year on a much bigger scale — but with the star wattage provided by Justin Timberlake instead of Green Day, and Amazon in place of Apple. The switch is an indicator of the continuing tension between the music industry and Apple. Pepsi’s earlier ad, set to Green Day’s version of the song “I Fought the Law,” prodded music fans to quit pirating music online and instead buy songs — legally — from Apple’s then-fledgling iTunes. Four years later, iTunes is by far the biggest digital music store, and the industry is taking a liking to Amazon’s rival music service, introduced in September. Though iTunes blazed a trail in encouraging fans to pay for music online, record executives now complain that Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, wields too much clout in setting prices and other terms. At issue now is whether the labels can help popularize a more industry-friendly service and accelerate the pace of digital sales. Behind this strategy is a growing desperation: sales of digital albums and songs are rising far too slowly to offset the rapid decline of the CD, the industry’s mainstay product. CD sales slid 19 percent last year; after adding in the 50 million digital albums sold last year and counting every 10 digital songs sold as an album, overall music sales were still down 9.5 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In trying to nurture Amazon’s service, the four major record companies have offered it one potential edge. One by one, they have agreed to offer their music catalogs for sale on the service in the MP3 format, without the digital locks that restrict users from making copies of the songs. (Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the second-biggest company and the last holdout, signed on last week. Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann). All of the companies except the EMI Group still require Apple to sell their music wrapped in digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which is intended to discourage rampant copying. Some consumers say D.R.M. creates confusing problems, like a lack of compatibility between most songs and the devices sold by Apple and Microsoft. In fact, it was Mr. Jobs who, in February, called on the industry to drop its longstanding insistence on the use of the software, saying it had failed to rein in piracy. In any case, the industry is waiting to see whether — and how quickly — Amazon can grow into a credible alternative to iTunes, and whether Mr. Jobs will stand by as his service, which commands as much as 80 percent of digital download sales, is challenged. “This is really a stare-down,” said one major label executive who was briefed on the new Pepsi promotion and who requested anonymity because he had not been authorized to speak about it. Industry executives say the rivalry could intensify if the two services jockey over who will be given exclusive rights to some songs or special promotions. A senior executive at another record company, who requested anonymity out of concern about irritating Mr. Jobs, said he was prepared to keep copy restrictions on his label’s songs on iTunes for six months to a year while Amazon establishes itself. Apple insists on selling all single tracks for 99 cents, while Amazon sells them for 89 cents to over a dollar. Danny Socolof, president of Mega, the Las Vegas marketing agency that developed the promotion, which is called “Pepsi Stuff,” said the industry’s collective shift away from D.R.M. would “unleash a new age in the music business, and it’s sorely needed.” He said Pepsi’s alliance with Amazon reflected in part the record companies’ “desire to increase the retail space” online “and help level the playing field.” In the promotion, to be announced Monday, consumers who buy Pepsi drinks will receive points that can be redeemed for music downloads at a special section of the Amazon site. Amazon and Pepsi, a brand of PepsiCo, will give away up to a billion songs, along with prizes like DVDs and electronics, though only a fraction of the eligible Pepsi packages are expected to be redeemed. The biggest of the four music companies, the Universal Music Group, has declined to join the offer, executives briefed on the situation said, over a pricing disagreement. (Universal, a part of Vivendi, will still sell music through the Amazon service.) The Warner Music Group is also expected to participate. Amazon is expected to pay the record companies around 40 cents for each track that is given away in the Pepsi offer; Amazon’s usual payment ranges from 65 to 70 cents, executives briefed on the deal said. Industry analysts said they expected Apple to treat the situation as a minor annoyance. And an expansion of the digital music market is likely to increase sales of iPods, which are more lucrative than the iTunes store and dominate the digital player market. Forcing Apple to continue selling restricted music is “kind of like a couple of pebbles in the shoe,” said Michael McGuire, an analyst at Gartner. To Apple, he said, “maintaining parity is probably somewhat important, but in the end, they’re still selling iPods.” He noted that Amazon also sells many iPods. An Apple spokesman declined to discuss the company’s competitors but pointed to Mr. Jobs’s letter of February, which said Apple would embrace a D.R.M.-free world. It is far from clear that Amazon’s unrestricted music files will be an advantage. Russ Crupnick, an analyst at the NPD Group, joked that D.R.M. should stand for “doesn’t really matter.” Mr. Crupnick said he did not think many iTunes customers were bothered by copy restrictions or would defect to Amazon to buy unencumbered music. But, he said, Amazon may find an opportunity to expand the overall market. “The much bigger target is all of the people who don’t do digital downloading yet. How do I convince them that digital music is a good thing to begin with? I think Amazon is in a good position to do that, but it’s a long struggle,” Mr. Crupnick said. Others suggest that the struggle may be so long that the industry will decide to experiment with other ideas, like the offering of music free through ad-supported Web sites, or subscriptions attached to cellphones. “I’ve never thought that the pay-per-song model was really a replacement” for the CD, said David Goldberg, a former general manager of Yahoo’s music service who works at the investment firm Benchmark Capital. But the industry may endure more suffering before an answer emerges, he said. “It’s going to be a very dramatic change in the business. It’s just a question of when, not if.”

eee.....like I said before, she needs to stop drinking and/or drugging, go to meetings and get a sponsor. It's pretty sad to see someone fall apart, in the news or on a street corner.

My gmail seems ok.

Keep it up. Ignore the blackouts. Keep going .... You said you were blocking my posts with the ignore function. You have to be honest with yourself first Dan. yeah well, no more free rides for an a-hole like you. How's that anger management class coming along? How's that health problem? Just fine Dan. How's that low self esteem problem?

Keep it up. Ignore the blackouts. Keep going .... You said you were blocking my posts with the ignore function. You have to be honest with yourself first Dan. yeah well, no more free rides for an a-hole like you. How's that anger management class coming along?

Report: Bjork Attacks Photographer WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Icelandic singer Bjork attacked a newspaper photographer shortly after she arrived at New Zealand's Auckland International Airport on Sunday, local media reported. Bjork, who is in the northern city of Auckland to perform at the Big Day Out concert on Friday, tore "New Zealand Herald" photographer Glenn Jeffrey's shirt after he photographed her arriving at the airport early Sunday, he told news agency New Zealand Press Association according to a report on Monday. Jeffrey, a news photographer for 25 years, said Bjork was accompanied by a man who asked him not take photos. "I took a couple of pictures ... and as I turned and walked away she came up behind me, grabbed the back of my black skivvy (T-shirt) and tore it," he told the agency. "As she did this, she fell over, she fell to the ground," he said. "At no stage did I touch her or speak with her." Bjork said nothing throughout the incident but her male companion was saying: "'B, don't do this, B, don't do this,'" Jeffrey said. Jeffrey said he spoke with Auckland police about the incident later Sunday. Bjork or a representative were not immediately available to comment on the report.

We need a Smooth Jazz forum, so I can ignore it.

Keep it up. Ignore the blackouts. Keep going .... You said you were blocking my posts with the ignore function. You have to be honest with yourself first Dan. edit: I made an apt. with Dr. Phil for you Dan. PM with info sent.

January 14, 2008 No Sign of Spears at Custody Hearing By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 1:38 p.m. ET LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Britney Spears was nowhere to be seen Monday as a court hearing convened in her child custody battle with ex-husband Kevin Federline. Federline and his lawyer were on hand as Superior Court Commissioner Scott Gordon began the hearing, which was scheduled after Gordon earlier this month suspended Spears' right to visit her sons. Gordon allowed reporters into the courtroom for about one minute before he announced that the hearing was being closed. The commissioner granted a motion from Spears' attorneys to quash a subpoena, but there was no information given about what the subpoena involved or to whom it had been issued. A throng of photographers and reporters waited outside the downtown courthouse to see if Spears would come to what one attorney described as ''the most significant hearing in the case so far.'' Law enforcement officers watched over the scene. Spears, 26, has had trouble making recent legal dates: On Dec. 12, she called in sick for a court-ordered deposition, then arrived nearly two hours late at an attorney's office on its rescheduled date, Jan. 3. Federline's attorney, Mark Vincent Kaplan, told The Associated Press on Sunday that he didn't know if Spears would come to Monday's hearing, and he indicated that it would be important for her to be there to take the opportunity to try to persuade the court restore visitation. ''You can't phone this one in,'' he said. Police and emergency medical technicians who were summoned to Spears' home the night of Jan. 3 in a standoff involving her refusal to return the boys to Federline were expected to testify Monday, probably behind closed doors, Kaplan said. Kaplan said he knew it was only a temporary measure when he obtained emergency court orders two weeks ago granting sole physical and legal custody to Federline. Police were called by a court-appointed monitor Jan. 3 when Spears refused to hand over Jayden James, 1, and Sean Preston, 2, to Federline's security guard. She locked herself in a room with one of the boys. Police officers spent hours at the house and then called Fire Department paramedics who placed her on a gurney and took her to a hospital with a crowd of paparazzi in pursuit. Spears left Cedars-Sinai Medical Center a day and half later. Police have released no information about why Spears was taken to the hospital. TV's ''Dr. Phil'' McGraw told celebrity news programs he was with Spears as she was released, saying she was in ''dire'' need of medical and psychological help. That drew a rebuke from Spears' relatives. The day after the incident, Kaplan presented papers to the court commissioner, who awarded sole legal and physical custody of the boys to Federline and suspended Spears' visitation rights. Kaplan said if visitation is restored, it would be under more restrictions than those originally imposed by Gordon. Sad, but I can't stop holding my breath.

Well, you guys have all said how out of touch you are, and you've proven it. Aside from the embarrassingly dated nature of the words above, most of them don't even apply to pop music today. These are Leonard Bernstein's words from his 1967 TV special about "today's pop music." He was talking about songs such as "No Man Can Find the War" by Tim Buckley and "Surf's Up" by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. Those darn kids...

I'm getting old, I'm out of touch.

Wiki

Mode's Scelsi Edition http://www.moderecords.com/profiles/giacintoscelsi.html

eee...missed 'is birthday celebration, but I did notice this: and this review: http://www.sequenza21.com/cdreviews/?p=220