JSngry

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/arts/frank-delaney-74-author-whose-passion-was-deconstructing-joyces-ulysses-dies.html To help frazzled readers find their way through the novel’s 260,000 words while making them less forbidding, Mr. Delaney, in the first episode of his podcast, invoked the “Peanuts” character Snoopy. He also wrote a rap tribute to Joyce. Some conventional scholars were appalled, to which Mr. Delaney parried, “No one hates a popularizer more than an intellectual.”

Tonight at the DSO AKUB HRŮŠA conducts VILDE FRANG violin MARTINŮ - The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca BRITTEN - Violin Concerto R. STRAUSS - Also sprach Zarathustra Local reviews of the Thursday show (both of them!) were not enthusiastic about the Martinu & Strauss, but were knocked out by Frang's Britten. I was too, she brung it good on a piece that has a buttload of it to bring. Now I am intrigued by both her and it, their intensities and range were reciprocative, quite. About the Martinu, all I can say is that according to the program, the DSO has not performed this piece since 1958. That's insane, but that's show business. It's a complex piece, but a supremely coherent one, and the reservations of the reviewers from Thursday seem to my ears to have been largely cleaned up by Saturday. It was, perhaps, a little timid overall, but jeesus, 1958? Really? Is anybody in the band then left alive? Or from the audience? I know we've upped the ante in terms of players the last few years, and surely some of them have played this before, but...more Martinu wouldn't hurt anybody,of course I speak for myself, but, you know, 1958? Complaints about the Strauss had to do with generalistic conducting and an overall lack of shading. And yeah, still some of that, I saw eyes on the concertmaster a LOT, and the last passage was a little watery in terms of downbeats, and that was unfortunate. But still, this is a fun piece of music to listen to, it's like everything i needed to know i learned in kindergarten, well, everything you'll hear in this piece is in that world-famously recognizable and renowned introductory movement. it still makes me smile to hear how that works. I guess maybe if you've heard all the classical music in the world it might be old-hat, perhaps even corny, but it still tickels me to hear somebody composing like that, playing with themes like riffing on a few words, spinning them around and out and back in from kernel to riff to elongated phras3es and back again, i love it when that happens. I did see something happen during that piece that I've never seen before - Hrusa was really cranking it along when FWEEEE, out comes his baton, out of his hand, up into the air like a pop foull, and BOINK right in the front row it lands. We're on the third row, and I forgot for a microsecond that this was The Meyerson, and not The Ballpark. But a cooler head prevailed. The guy it landed in front of, though, it took him a few seconds, but eventually he placed it back on the podium. Hruska kept churning along and then incorporated a swoop into his churn and reached down, picked it up, all without missing a beat, and then found a curnpoint to turn around and smile a thank you at the guy who had returned his baton, again without missing a beat. It was some funny shit, really, and even if that had happened on a record, you would only see it live, at least you could only believe the surprise and bizzarity if you saw it live. However, the returner was not acknowledged during the concluding bows, so c'mon dude, we all saw it, don't act like it didn't happen, the dude could have sent it to the organization a week later and ask that it be returned with an autograph, this is Texas, afterall, just sayin'. I guess Hrusa's been here before, not that I've seen, but I haven't been going regularly but a few years now. One reviewer spoke highly of his past performances, says that the players like him, and that he's in the running to replace van Zweeden (which was why this reviewer was disappointed by what he heard). Nobody bitched about the way the band played the Britten, and I'm like, Martinu, 1958, didn't sound as bad to me on Saturday as it did to the reviewers on Thursday, so...I like that he's young, I like that he brings Martinu (1958!), and I like that he got a total win on the Britten. I don't like that his concertmaster had to do his job on the Strauss a little more obviously than necessary, and I don't like that the closing passages lost the pocket, and almost lost their coherence altogether, that's not good. Nevertheless, whatever happened on the Strauss, Martinu & Britten were a meaty, substantial fare. Strauss was fun, and it was definitely an evening of music worth leaving home for. And oh yeah, Vilde Frang is a monster, comes on the stage looking like an evening-gowned waif on the verge of starvation, plays like the one person left who's gonna save the world from itself, and has a look in her eyes (remember, we were on the third row) the intensity of which I've seen equaled by only a handful of people, one of them being Betty Carter. So, yeah, check your local listings.

I don't think she told Franz Jackson shit, to be honest. If anything, it was the other way around, and I don't think that's what he told her to do.

e pluribus unum

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/business/media/gary-cartwright-dead-texas-writer.html “One of the best stories ever that Cartwright wrote, or that the magazine published, was one of Cartwright’s first stories,” Mr. Smith said. “It was about Jay J. Armes, a private detective in El Paso who literally had hooks for arms. You cannot make this up.” In the weeks leading up to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Dallas apartment that Mr. Cartwright shared with his friend and fellow reporter, Bud Shrake, was a popular late-night hangout for, among others, Jack Ruby and one of Ruby’s favorite strippers, Jada. Mr. Ruby, the nightclub owner who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, was a recurring figure in Mr. Cartwright’s journalism. As Mr. Cartwright wrote in “Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter” (1983), “On the morning of the assassination, Ruby called our apartment and asked if we’d seen Jada.” Mr. Cartwright’s work appeared alongside that of Larry McMurtry, J. Frank Dobie, Molly Ivins, Katherine Anne Porter and other Texas writers in the 2003 anthology “Lone Star Literature.” The book included this Cartwright passage: “If there is a tear left, shed it for Jack Ruby. He didn’t make history; he only stepped in front of it. When he emerged from obscurity into that inextricable freeze-frame that joins all of our minds to Dallas, Jack Ruby, a baldheaded little man who wanted above all else to make it big, had his back to the camera.” Even more famous was his 1976 Texas Monthly cover article about one of Ruby’s stripper friends, a Texas folk hero named Candy Barr. “They say she once sat waiting in a rocking chair talking to sweet Jesus,” Mr. Cartwright wrote, “and when her ex-husband kicked down the door, she threw down on him with a pistol that was resting conveniently in her lap. She shot him in the stomach, but she was aiming for the groin.”

Stripped of its instrument-specific outcome, I think that's a more or less definitive/foolproof decisional paradigm for all of life.

http://www.npd117.net/cms/lib02/IL01001910/Centricity/Domain/11/12-14-12%204th%20-%20Decomposing%20Fractions.pdf

If all he did was "just" produce... I'd like to say that every pop artist deserves this type of masterful production, but let's be honest - they don't.

Because they can.

Hell yeah.

Sonny Crockett Jiminy Cricket Kwai Chang Caine

I applaud you for setting the music free. The package will have to sell itself, but the music is now out there for posterity, if posterity wants it. I sure hope they do.

Skoo Skoo Chee!!!

I like that he considered his options beyond the immediate offerings. Hell, I like that he even considered the possibility that he had options. And I like the CFL for existing as an option. The Browns would get their Syracuse running back soon enough!

Rest assured that now that the music has been released to/in the digital domain, it will be available forever more, or at least as long as there is digital media.

RIP & much love. He's been one of those people who I started off really liking only to find that the more I listened to him, the more I heard. It so often works the other way around, but not for this guy. Depth of character!

Not really actvely interested in CFL per se, but it seems like a notable passing relative to the sociology of the Athletic Industrial Complex in general. Americans tend to think that all sports "firsts" are ours, and it just ain't so.

Oh wow...he was a giant. RIP and much love.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/arts/james-stevenson-dead-new-yorker-cartoonist.html Mr. Stevenson shifted easily from light social commentary to a silliness that often had its roots in art, current events or old jokes. One of his cartoons showed a particularly glum egg and a chicken meeting at a supermarket checkout line. Each has a shopping basket in tow. “Who’s next?” the cashier asks. Another pictured three frogs on a lily pad. One, a youngster, says, “Tell us again about Monet, Grandpa.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/science/mildred-dresselhaus-dead-queen-of-carbon.html One reason Dr. Dresselhaus said she chose to study carbon was its relative unpopularity. “I was happy to work on a project that most people thought was hard and not that interesting,” she said. “If one day I had to be at home with a sick child, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.” For its part, carbon is as capricious as any celebrity. It is the graphite of a pencil, worn down by a simple doodle. Arrayed in a three-dimensional crystal, it is a diamond, the hardest substance known. Dr. Dresselhaus used resonant magnetic fields and lasers to map out the electronic energy structure of carbon. She investigated the traits that emerge when carbon is interwoven with other materials: Stitch in some alkali metals, for example, and carbon can become a superconductor, in which an electric current meets virtually no resistance. Dr. Dresselhaus was a pioneer in research on fullerenes, also called buckyballs: soccer-ball-shaped cages of carbon atoms that can be used as drug delivery devices, lubricants, filters and catalysts. She conceived the idea of rolling a single-layer sheet of carbon atoms into a hollow tube, a notion eventually realized as the nanotube — a versatile structure with the strength of steel but just one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. She worked on carbon ribbons, semiconductors, nonplanar monolayers of molybdenum sulfide, and the scattering and vibrational effects of tiny particles introduced into ultrathin wires. She published more than 1,700 scientific papers, co-wrote eight books and gathered a stack of accolades as fat as a nanotube is fine. Dr. Dresselhaus was awarded the National Medal of Science, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (bestowed by President Barack Obama), the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Enrico Fermi prize and dozens of honorary doctorates. She also served as president of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and worked in the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration. “Every morning she’d leave the house at 5:30, the first car in the parking lot every day, and everyone she collaborated with she viewed as family,” said Ms. Cooper, Dr. Dresselhaus’s granddaughter, who is a graduate student at M.I.T. “Her life and her science were intertwined.”

He had been a star quarterback with Syracuse University and was selected by the Cleveland Browns in the 1951 National Football League draft. Told he would play safety with the Browns, he resisted the move and opted to sign with Hamilton. He started every game at quarterback in his first season. https://www.nytimes.com/.../football/bernie-custis-dead-first-black-pro-quarterback.html

Open Up as a title - with or without the models - is the most natural sequel to Hot Dog the album cover ever.

I really like how he "got" Creed Taylor & CTI, still, imo, some of the most misunderstood jazz records ever. I've met very few people on either side of the fence who got what Taylor was up to, they like or dislike it without getting the whole thing about artfully constructed settings and contexts. it wasn't just about selling records, it was about creating settings, making "vocal records" with "jazz instrumentalists" (I got this concept handed to me by reading Marc Myers lines to the Wes Verve box, it was one of those lightbulb moments for me). At it's worst, it was horrible, but at its best (or near best), it was brilliantly successful as music and as product alike, and I still maintain that something like Sunflower or Salt Song would still be works of art with or without mass sales success. It's like "concertos" for the soloists, as opposed to blowing sessions, or even working band or project band records.