Brad

Well, I changed my mind and ordered the set today. Received a notice my order has been sent to the warehouse. I checked and a couple of the individual CDs I have are CDRs so I can dispose of those now.

Slightly off topic but since Chewy mentioned it, the Dead site On IOS is Relisten; there are a lot of other groups on there besides the Dead (most of whom I’ve never heard of but are probably known to other listeners. In addition, all the Dead concerts on Relisten come from the Internet Archive. No cost unless you wish to make a donation.

He’s terrible. A pseudo intellectual. I tend to skip his articles.

Mets just held a conference call. They’re the masters of corporate speak.

Beltran is out. Mets looking forward new manager.

A classic album cover.

Disc 1

Last week, the New Yorker republished this essay by Whitney Balliett that was originally published in 1976. Bird: The Brilliance of Charlie Parker The following is the email from the Archives Editor, Erin Overbey, discussing Whitney Balliett. Hopefully, reproducing it in full doesn’t violate any policy. “The music critic Whitney Balliett once remarked that jazz is a highly personal medium—“like poetry, it is an art of surprise.” Balliett contributed more than five hundred pieces to The New Yorker, from 1952 to 2001. He was the magazine’s jazz critic for five decades, during which he wrote about a wide assortment of figures, such as Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Rosemary Clooney, and Thelonious Monk. He also published seventeen books, including “Such Sweet Thunder” and “Jelly Roll, Jabbo, and Fats.” He was so prolific that it’s difficult to pick just one of his pieces to recommend. In a portrait of the bassist and bandleader Charles Mingus, Balliett writes one of the best ledes of any piece of jazz criticism published in the nineteen-seventies. (“Charles Mingus, the incomparable forty-nine-year-old bassist, composer, bandleader, autobiographer, and iconoclast, has spent much of his life attempting to rearrange the world according to an almost Johnsonian set of principles that abhor, among other things, cant, racism, inhibition, managerial greed, sloppy music, Uncle Tomism, and conformity.”) One of my favorite pieces by Balliett is his profile of the jazz legend Charlie (Bird) Parker, from 1976. In “Bird,” Balliett chronicles both Parker’s wild personal excesses and his lyrical virtuosity. Balliett’s prose swoops and glides across the page, evoking the saxophonist’s masterly shifts in tone and timbre. “He could do anything he liked with time, and in his ballads he lagged behind the beat, floated easily along on it, or leapt ahead of it; he did things with time that no one had yet thought of and that no one has yet surpassed. His ballads were dense visions, glimpses into an unknown musical dimension,” Balliett writes. “Although they were perfectly structured, they seemed to have no beginnings and no endings; each was simply another of the visions that stirred and maddened his mind.” Balliett’s work crackles with intensity and precision as he nimbly documents the profound ways in which Parker turned the world of jazz upside down and helped usher in a new musical era. As he traces Parker’s evolution as an artist, Balliett offers a master class in critical dexterity—and in making an art out of narrative revelation.”

Just watched the doc “Echo Canyon,” which tells the story of the Laurel Canyon scene where a lot of rock stars lived. Jakob Dylan talks to a lot of people from that time like Roger McGuinn, Brian Wilson, Michelle Phillips, Crosby and Stills and Nash, and the late Tom Petty; and Dylan and his mates like Beck and Fiona Apple song some of the songs from 1964-67 in a concert held in 2015. Very enjoyable.

God!, Rhino Customer Service is beyond awful. There is just no comparison.

I remember when Straight No Filter was one of the hardest cds to find and sellers charged a massive price for it.

I’d have to think that, yes, there will be limits on the present uses and that you do it again at your peril but players will look to find something else, as you mentioned.

Players are always looking for an edge and will “push the envelope” until they are stopped. Now that the use of electronic equipment to steal signs has been curtailed, players will look for other ways to gain an advantage. One byproduct of the Houston incident is that team officials will become more vigilant about what their players are doing. In corporate America, employees are required to take courses about compliance with various laws, etc. I can now see teams rolling out these kinds of courses for players and team personnel.

Good Le Carre. Not his best but still very enjoyable.

Yes, it’s a different game. Not sure it’s better but GM interference is a fact of life. Apologies for the grouchiness; I wish the Mets were a premier franchise!

Like other teams they’ve had some good ones and some bad ones; the Giants had a good one with Bochy (obviously) but their recent one is poor at best, considering his resume with the Phillies. The consensus seems to be that Beltran will not be fired but we shall see.

And this is supposed to mean what?

I have this on cd. Good Art I thought. Never saw him in concert but did get to see Ponomarev several years ago.

Torts wasn’t my favorite course. I took naturally to Contracts and one of the benefits of the course was that I learned Article 2, which served me well later in my professional life. The same professor also drilled us on Bankruptcy Law and I later on had a few bankruptcy cases involving suppliers; nothing complicated, mind you. Never really cared for Real Property Law, too cute and dry for me. Same for Trust and Estates. I think the most important thing I learned from those courses that it wasn’t malpractice in California to draft a will that violated the rule against perpetuities Oddly enough, in the latter part of my career, when our company was acquired, most of my work centered around real property.

This is an excerpt from the New York Times story: “Manfred’s report also named the Mets’ new manager, Carlos Beltran, as one of the Houston players who initiated the idea of decoding and communicating signs with help from an illicit camera in center field and a video monitor near the dugout. Beltran is not facing discipline from the league, though, and a Mets spokesman said the team had no comment on his inclusion in the report.” Frankly, I don’t see how he keeps his job. Technology, Once the Astros’ Ally, Helps Do Them In

He’s probably on the chopping block too. It wouldn’t surprise me if Hinch was hired by the Mets when his suspension is up. He and the GM are good friends.

The ones that stand out are You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me and I Only Want to be With You. Back in the mid 60s, she reminded me of a female Tom Jones.