7/4

See my previous post that started with the phrase "Nonsense."

I'm sure you're not comparing Reggie White to Hitler ! Nonsense. I'm comparing people who apologize for Mr. White to those who do the same for Hitler. A bit of a stretch, but there's nothing cool about White's stoopid remarks.

Eh? He said some dumb shit.

How long before someone mentions how Hitler was probably a swell guy and kind to his friends too?

And that's exactly the attitude that I find repulsive. "Sack sin"? We are in the time of the stoopid people. They vote for stoopid people and steal entire elections. They agree with dumb shit other stoopid people say, don't think twice about it and when you call them on this thoughtless behavior, they see nothing wrong with their mindlessness. Where's the next tailgate party? Yeah team and praise the lord!

The band sounds great...never got that kind of "singing"....

It's an amazing review. Makes me want to run out and pick up the album. I don't listen to much metal these days, but I'm curious.

Interesting take on jazz and metal: December 27, 2004 CRITIC'S CHOICE: NEW CD Hast Seen the New Metal Album? By BEN RATLIFF Metal has more than a little in common with jazz, which may be one of the reasons I like it. I won't connect the dots between improvisational styles in jazz and metal, though I know several metal-loving jazz musicians who could. But here are the facts: both kinds of music have a few big, durable, long-haul names - Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, Wynton Marsalis, Keith Jarrett (I have never typed those proper nouns in a row before) - and, miles beneath them, hundreds of good-to-great bands that are the beneficial termites of American culture, gradually breaking down dead styles and returning them to the soil. To their small but deep audiences, they are loved, reviled, subdivided endlessly into styles and argued about passionately. Both kinds of musicians, jazz and metal, are deeply concerned with technique, and deal with essential aesthetic issues of style and progress. There is a dominant sound (or several) in jazz, as there is in metal, and for the last 20 years adjustments to those dominant sounds have been made at a much slower rate. (Does this mean the genres are exhausted? No. It means that the musicians' perceptions of the music's needs have changed.) To an outsider, great swaths of metal sound just about the same. Ditto jazz. Generally speaking, both kinds of music rest on an underground, highly coded premise in the if-you-have-to-ask-you'll-never-know category. These circumstances make it possible for a great metal record to appear without the larger world of popular music ever knowing about it. "Leviathan" (Relapse), the second album by the Atlanta band Mastodon, has so far been that kind of record. Let's get the concept out of the way quickly. "Leviathan" is a song cycle based on Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick." The band's drummer, Brann Dailor, was reading the novel last year and came across the early passage that calls the whale "the salt-sea Mastodon"; after that, the rest of the book seemed like a metaphor for a small crew of manic, undershowered rock musicians on tour. (The whale is the audience, if you like, or maybe the elusive quantity of hard-rock apotheosis.) The directly Melville-related lyrics on "Leviathan" appear early. The line "There's magic in the water that attracts all men" roars over a crooked riff in "I Am Ahab." Others apply by extension: "Island" invokes the old metal themes of Norse gods and volcanic eruptions, and the lyrics of "Hearts Alive" are generally about watery violence. But what's fantastic about "Leviathan" is that it sums up the last three decades of hard rock - a great width of styles, bludgeoning and tricky, from Metallica to Iron Maiden to King Crimson to Black Flag to Black Sabbath - with incredible acuity, extracting a great deal of what has been most effective in them. Yet the music doesn't seem like a dull exercise in classicism or position itself above the form altogether. Mastodon comes from an intellectual underground of the genre: Mr. Dailor and Bill Kelliher, one of the band's guitarists, were once in Today Is the Day, a kind of severe art-rock band. There can be a queasy air of superiority in the studied under-productions and over-cogitations of underground metal, whether it's the kind that deals with polymetric rhythms or the kind that deliberately repeats a droning riff more times than you thought possible. You don't find that in "Leviathan." Mastodon has nearly mastered rock dynamics: they start out with durable riffs, build them up, then tunnel into tricky new strains of frenetic melody, diverting your attention from the payoff. When the reward finally comes, it is gold-plated, returning home to the viscous riff and the earthquake groove. (The music is written cooperatively by the four band members, who include Troy Sanders on bass and the guitarist Brent Hinds; the dense, shiny production is by Matt Bayles.) Mr. Dailor occasionally plays much more complex fills than he needs to. These songs hold together through a thought-out symmetry, but they do have many parts. One of the guitarists plays a careening country lick during a break in "Megalodon," after a line about a watery grave, and before a fast Iron Maiden-like two-beat rhythm. There's so much flash and detail. Yet through the record they keep serving the bottom level, the no-nonsense headbanger frequencies of metal. The record keeps those questions in the air that keep an album interesting: Who are these guys? What's their angle? Who allowed them to do this many things?

Happy Birthday Jazzmoose!

Yahoo News: "All the planet is vibrating" from the quake, said Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute. Speaking on SKY TG24 TV, Boschi said the quake even disturbed the Earth's rotation.

Yahoo News: Nearly 11,500 dead as huge earthquake triggers destruction across Asia

That's too young!

I think so too. I saw this when I got up this morning, around 5:30. There was almost nothing on the TV news and the web was only reporting 3,000 dead. I went back to sleep and woke up in time to start seeing footave on the Today show. I wonder what the aftershocks will do.

WTF?

And then there's: Scientist: Asteroid May Hit Earth in 2029 Thu Dec 23, 5:40 PM ET By JOHN ANTCZAK, Associated Press Writer LOS ANGELES - There's a 1-in-300 chance that a recently discovered asteroid, believed to be about 1,300 feet long, could hit Earth in 2029, a NASA (news - web sites) scientist said Thursday, but he added that the perceived risk probably will be eliminated once astronomers get more detail about its orbit. There have been only a limited number of sightings of Asteroid 2004 MN4, which has been given an initial rating of 2 on the 10-point Torino Impact Hazard Scale used by astronomers to predict asteroid or comet impacts, said Donald Yeomans, manager of the Near Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. No previously observed asteroid has been graded higher than 1. On Friday, April 13, 2029, "we can't yet rule out an Earth impact," Yeomans said. "But the impact probability, as we call it, is 300-to-1 against an impact." The asteroid was discovered in June and rediscovered this month. "This is not a problem for anyone and it shouldn't be a concern to anyone, but whenever we post one of these things and ... somebody gets ahold of it, it just gets crazy," he said. "In the unlikely event that it did hit, it would be quite serious. We're talking either a tsunami if it hit in the ocean, which would be likely, or significant ground damage," Yeomans said. Its estimated size has been inferred from its brightness, which assumes that its reflectivity is similar to other asteroids that have been observed. At about 1,320 feet in length, it would have about 1,600 megatons of energy, Yeomans said. Asteroid 2004 MN4 takes less than a year to go all the way around the sun and on each orbit it passes by Earth's orbit twice, Yeomans said. It is also nearly on the same plane as Earth's orbit. The asteroid will be visible for the next several months and the NEO program has alerted its network of ground-based observers to include 2004 MN4 in their searches. Yeomans said there have now been about 40 observations, first from the observatory at Kitt Peak, near Tucson, Ariz., and this month from Australia and New Zealand.

happy xmas forks!

I've never watched more than a few minutes of it. I did surf past it last night to an episode of Law & Order SUV.

The yule log, which has won its time slot in the Nielsen ratings each year since it was brought back in 2001, can also be seen in HDTV. (Illustration by The New York Times; photograph from WPIX-WB11)

December 25, 2004 TV REVIEW | 'YULE LOG' Once Again, Having Its 7 Minutes of Flame By ALESSANDRA STANLEY The flames flicker too fast. The Christmas morning yule log special on WPIX - a four-hour tape of a log blazing brightly in a fireplace - is not for the fainthearted. The unextinguishable electronic hearth is a beloved New York tradition, but it would be a stretch to call it soothing. Even with Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby crooning carols on the audio track, the pulsing flames mesmerize, but less like a snifter of brandy than like a double dose of methamphetamine. In fact, staring at the yule log for an extended period may induce the kind of seizures that in December 1997 struck hundreds of Japanese children who watched a Pokémon cartoon with too many flashing lights and Pikachu. This year the yule log will also be shown in high-definition television on WPIX's digital channel, WPIX-DT (channel 12). The HDTV version provides "a very sharp image of flames," said Ted Faraone, a WPIX spokesman. Parental discretion advised. Memory can be misleading, of course. Apparently, the fire has always burned fast and furiously. Mr. Faraone said the yule log had not been speeded up or tampered with when it was digitally remastered in 2001, the year WPIX brought it back after a 12-year hiatus. He insisted that the tape was the same one that was made in 1970, a loop that runs just under seven minutes. That's the one most viewers remember, though surely back then the fire gave off a slower, more stately glow. The background music is no more menacing than "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," but visually, it begins to look a lot like the opening conflagration shot in the World War II documentary "The World at War." The original, first shown in 1966, was a black-and-white 17-second loop that was filmed at Gracie Mansion when John Lindsay was mayor. That clip, though, was too short and needed to be redone. But after a film crew accidentally set fire to an Oriental rug by removing the safety grate for an unobstructed view of the flames, the station was not invited back for a reshoot. Eventually, a television studio with a working fireplace was found in California, and the station created the image that has allowed a generation of apartment-bound New Yorkers to re-enact "Christmas in Connecticut." (Or "Fahrenheit 451.") For some, the yule log is an easy, pleasantly cheesy backdrop to tree trimming and gift-wrapping. But it is also a Dadaist joke: television as the hearth, not just metaphorically but literally. Whatever the reasons, there is no question that the yule log is cherished by viewers. When WPIX decided to stop showing it in 1989, the station was flooded with complaints and a grass-roots lobbying campaign sprang up to bring it back. Ersatz and, at some level, deeply pathetic, the television yule log became one of those mourned New York landmarks that make up the city's shared nostalgia, like the Automat and Ebbets Field. (And someday, no doubt, the Naked Cowboy in Times Square.) Connoisseurs trade as a trivia question the name of the man who brought the yule log to television (Fred Thrower, who was general manager of WPIX from 1953 to 1975, and died in 1999). The show's mystique grew during its dark period: each year since WPIX brought it back in 2001, the log has won its time period in the city's overnight Nielsen ratings. This year, viewers in cities like Chicago and Dallas can see what they have been missing when the log is shown early on Christmas Eve on Superstation WGN (like WPIX, a Tribune Company television station). And throughout the holiday season, anyone can start a quick fire on a laptop by linking to the log online (www.wb11.com), though it would probably be best not to download it in a crowded theater. For all its hypnotic charm, the fireplace tableau still raises the question: why not reshoot and update it - a new log, different fire irons, daintier flames? It would not be sacrilege to try a new angle showing a little more brick, a little less log. Television is fearless about remaking classics. (In 1977 Marlo Thomas starred in "It Happened One Christmas," a gender-reversed version of "It's a Wonderful Life.") So it is a little odd that WPIX has never considered it. But sometimes it seems the business world learned a little too much from the lesson of New Coke. Still, the old yule log is better than no yule log at all. And it may be unfair to judge it solely by the two-hour review tape distributed to critics. The real tape is an extravaganza twice as long. The abridged version could well represent a subjective part of the work, the director's cut.

He's cool. I heard him at the Knit around the time of A Cloud of Black Birds, very interesting sound.

Part of what makes him great. He sounds like himself!

Wayne Shorter as leader of the band Weather Report, at the Juan-les-Pins jazz festival in France in 1984. (Eric Gaillard/Agence France-Presse)

Paul Bley & Scorpio Bill Laswell & Gigi The Songs of Junior Kimbrough - Sunday Nights ...all used

Thanks! A place to announce those WKCR fests!