JSngry

I don't care how old he is, James Mood can PLAY! As long as he has a life, he should be playing it, just as he always has. Write that book right up to the closing sentence, last period, THE END! I have no problem with that whatsoever, and question the spiritual core of anybody who does. What I do have a problem with is other motherfuckers not even having a book to write but not letting that stop them from getting published. WTF are THEY gonna be doing at 83, huh?

Couldn't be put any more clearly than that. Funny, I said "YEAH" to Jim's original post, but your bringing this bit out, Larry, has made me think about it and it's not quite right. Ownership - particularly of these large firms - is vested in the shareholders and other investors in the company, in particular (in this context) Union funds, but also pension funds and the owners of other similar investment instruments. In other words, you, you, you and you. Indeed it is. But this fact is not reflective of the "business culture", and therein lie the problem (or one of them...). And then there's the matter of private corporations, of which there are some of note. That's old-school "ownership" on its pure form right there, and the behavior of these companies would appear to follow no one particular pattern, which is more than you can say about the recent behavior of so many publicly held companies, which leads me to wonder if maybe the notion of "publicly owned" has devolved once and for all into Fleecing The Suckers. Bottom line, though, for me = "Ownership" = them that gots the juice & have the tools to keep it no matter what. Technically not a correct definition, but as a practical matter. And no, it is not at all a bad thing to be ownership. It's a good thing, actually. But being a self-obsessed jerk isn't... Management (and, really, I'm talking about top management) is what feels itself intrinsically more valuable to society than labour. Now it's true that, usually, these top managers own shares in their company (or share options) or in other companies, but that ownership stake is tiny compared to the stake of a trade union. Tiny in terms of percentage of ownership, but when you look at the leverage that comes with owning exponentially more shares than any one "typical" individual shareholder, there is no question as to who's who & what's what when it comes to riding the horse at the front of the parade... Management is just a different kind of labour. Yeah, they're the highest-dollar of the high-dollar whores, and they think they don't work for a pimp. But they are wrong. Why management may very well feel itself justified in feeling itself intrinsically more valuable to society is because it gets a different rate of pay; a rate of pay that the members of the top echelon can decide on for themselves and have ratified by a tame AGM of shareholders whose representatives don't want to rock the boat. And all is in accord with the American Dream, isn't it? Or is it? That, my friend, depends on whose dream it is we're talking about - the one that includes the ongoing broad responsibilities that comes with success or the one that runs the titles and brings up the lights once that success has been achieved. Both are "The American Dream", only one's uncut & the other's been edited all to hell. MG

Got to hear The Love Connection the other day. I had long ignored this album just because of the cover, never turned it over to see that it was a collaboration Claus Ogerman. Not bad at all, a lot meatier than I would have expected, with top-shelf writing from Ogerman and some dandy extended, substance-heavy soloing (on synth, mostly, so beware ) from Chick Corea, and, best of all, a lot of serious playing from Hubbard. In Teh Grand Scheme Of Things, not exactly An Album Of Major Import, but otherthan that, not at all bad, and a helluva lot better, in every way, that I was expecting.

Just to be clear - I am not "defending" the UAW. As others (and I myself, previously) have noted, they are indeed part of the problem. But the key word there is part. I hear countless GOP congresspeople on the various news/talk shows talk about "poor management", and inevitably, if you listen long enough and/or if they talk long enough, they always bring that back to the UAW. Nothing else. Taht, Dear Friends, is dangerous. It is a lie, and it is nothing even remotely new. "Traditional" management hates unions on principal, and would love nothing better than to just make them go away. For them, unions are the labor equivalent of "affirmative action" - something that in their mind has no business even existing in the first place. But admitting this would be too much ugly honesty, so there are always rhetorical "work-aronds", other ways to "frame the issue" that can actually generate sympathy for the problems w/o calling attention to the motive. I've got a few friends who work in trucking/freight transportation/etc, and I hear similar "that's not how we do it here" stories about the Teamsters as well. These type attitudes/situations represent the devolution of the union movement into a shakedown crew, and I have no sympathy for that. None, sero, silch, nada, burn down the house and don't let anybody get out alive. But... BUT..... BUT....... If anybody thinks that the people - corporate management, "traditional" GOP congresspeople, etc - who are looking to bust the unions (and I'll go to the mat defending the notion that that is exactly what they are looking to do here), would be agreeable to having a newer, leaner, more bi-laterally sympathetic responsible form of organized labor representation organization raise up from the ashes, than you are a fool. Simple as that. The entire paradigm has to change. Look at the history of the union movement, look at what brought it about, look at the whats & whys of how they did what they had to do to get done what they got done (and everybody say THANK YOU!!! when you're through doing that...) & then tell me that management does not need to drop its "old ways" every bit as much as does labor. Unless you are nothing but a pig, you can't. The opening post of this thread implies the question, What does Toyota knows that GM doesn’t? and then proceeds to provide a very simple answer, one which I alluded to in my response to Chris - when everybody "does the right thing" as a matter of course, there are no need for solutions for problems that do not exists. And since power comes with responsibility to the point that one can say that power = responsibility, one can but conclude that management/ownership has the responsibility to create a paradigm with labor where labor no longer feels in competition with the mechanism which is feeding, clothing, and sheltering it's families, but instead feels a kinship, the yang to ownership's yin. It's so simple, really, but as long as ownership feels itself intrinsically more "valuable" to society than is labor, it ain't gonna happen. And yes - leadership begins at the top. And the top, Dear Friends,shows next to no sign of getting it. An estimated 3.1 million jobs are at stake here, jobs that are "related to" the American auto industry. That's a helluva lot of people. I have no earthly idea of what the "best" way to handle this whole sordid mess is, but I do know that the loss and/or curtailment of 3.1 million jobs will fuck up this already fragile economy, so OI'm thinking hat we kill who we gotta kill - management and outdated union models alike, take in who we gotta take in long enough to keep Armageddon at bay, and do whatever we gotta do to put it back together in a way that reflects modern concepts, not just of vehicles, but of management/labor relationships. 3.1 million jobs ain't nothing to play with. If that cannot, cannot be done, then we as a country will have proven that we have indeed become the cannibalistic swine that our worst enemies accuse of of being.

Ok, so subtract the health care costs and they'd be profitable right now. Subtract my living expenses & I'd have a lot more moiney in the bank as well, so what does that prove, really? A more salient question might be this - how much revenue would they need now to maintain those health care costs & still remain profitable? And would such revenue be a possibility if the products were better/more in line with consumer demands? Because gee, if you don't want a pickup or a bigass SUV, what the hell do you want from the Big 3? Beware of union-busting tactics under the guise of "reorganization". In spite of the frothy rhetoric being heard in some quarters, out-of-sync union contracts/etc are only a part of the problem these guys are facing, not the whole thing, or even the major part of it. But anybody with have a brain knows that there is a business/political faction that is drooling at the possibility of using this "crisis" as a way to bust the union. Proceed with caution. "Union" need not be a dirty word. "Scapegoat", however, is.

http://www.timelessjazz.com/product_info.p...products_id=459 I only knew Lee/Brown form some 70s stuff that was "not my thing" as they say. But this is some BAAAAAAD shit here! Highly recommended!

And that one less so (only somewhat) if you have albums by the original La Perfecta lineup.

That was my first thought as well.

No, not doing anything like that, just pointing out that imo, my initial noting of music=language was of a piece with the initial premise/thrust of this thread, and then capping it off with a one-word (Dig?) example/summation of the whole invention/codification/formula/cliche evolution that was intended as a little bit of wryness, but was perhaps either too clever or not clever enough to make its intended point. Too much talk!

I thnk I hear what you're trying to say, and would like to mostly agree with you, at least in principal, if I could be sure. In the meantime, two words for you babe - Monday Michiru.

Indeed, but the appearance of "formula" through "codification" is not one of them, nor is the appearance of "cliche" in the eyes of certain beholders of these formulae. Dig?

...the cosmic "all" really likes verbal language because it's the best privacy guard that it has.

You are speaking for yourself, & I for me. Actually, again, for me, verbal languages are a cheapening of the non-verbal languages (including music). These cheaper versions are certainly utilitarian and not without their own potential artfulness, but they inevitably give us a limited dimensionality that the non-verbal languages take over and run with as a matter of course. Would I be happier in a world where nobody spoke or wrote "words", but communicated only through sight, gesture, touch, scent, and "non-verbal" sounds? To automatically assume yes might be a little too "Romantic", but to automatically assume no might bespeak to a cynicism rooted in a lack of imagination, or maybe just an inability to conceive of the abstract actually becoming/being specific, that the perceieved "limitation" is in fact mine. "music is not quite a language in the way that verbal languages are". well. a sequoia is not quite a tree in the way that a bonsai is either. Let us not attempt to see justify the ultimately small scope of the verbal by using the strengths of its limitations to pretend that those strengths carry the day outside of their own immediate realm. Because they do not. When it comes to fully conveying the infinite fullness of life, verbal languages are ultimately verylimited languages.

My real point in all this, though was a simple one - the music(s) under discussion here are at root languages. So of course there's going to be formulas, and patterns, and all that stuff, just as in any language, and no, nobody will say "stop me if you've heard this one before", because even if you have (and of course, you more than likely have, nobody even thinks about saying that if they're certain of their originality, they just say it and let you get to it when and how you can, if you can), they're hoping that you'd like to hear it again (at least from them), and reality proves that they are not completely off-base in that hope.

Just from your heavy emphasis on emotion (care). Although I guess the noticing the aspect part of that isn't really phenomenological; that iconicity is more in the spirit of Wittgenstein... I don't know what any of that means. Sorry. It doesn't mean anything; that's the whole point of continental philosophy Oh hell, even nothing means something,otherwise it wouldn't be nothing, it just wouldn't be. But I still don't know what those terms mean. I haven't read/studied much "formal" philosophy. But if a "Heideggerian" is somebody who hides the good shit while digging around in used shops when you don't have the money on hand but soon will & you plan on coming back soon, count me in, at least before I got old and got credit.

We can hear something we've never heard before and understand it right away, no codification involved. Then as more people get hold of it and use it to represent at least as much as to present, it gets codified. That's when the "formulas" come in & that can be either good or bad, depending on, say, whether the end/intent of the formula is creating an efficiency or disguising a deficiency. Then some people lose interest, thinking that it's all a ruse, and sometimes it is. But in order to get past that, you have to look a substance apart from style, significance instead of signification, meaning apart from language instead of meaning of language. And then it starts all over again, all of it. And it never stops unless you choose for it to.

Surely language doesn't exist UNTIL it's codified. MG Not sure I agree with that...

Just from your heavy emphasis on emotion (care). Although I guess the noticing the aspect part of that isn't really phenomenological; that iconicity is more in the spirit of Wittgenstein... I don't know what any of that means. Sorry.

That is one of but many such examples.

Indeed, but much of this has to do with listening habits and past experiences. You, for example, have experience with "modern" big bands and color your opinions with that knowledge. On the other hand, many fans don't listen to that stuff as closely. One can listen to Kind of Blue from about 1000 directions and get different results - when does Cobb play sticks, and why. This sort of detail flies past folks without personal experience. There many levels of listening here. Indeed. I'm just saying that anybody who listens to anything with attentiveness long enough will begin to recognize the codification aspect of whatever language it is that is being listened to. Whatever "emotion" one then brings into the mix upon this recognition is probably going/likely to be more variable than the music itself. Myself, I think that "jaded" is an early phase, understandable, quite useful even, but one to be moved past if one is to be anything other than a dilettante or a thrill-seeker.

My advice would be to go back & get The Sun Of Latin Music & Unfinished Masterpiece. They're not on Concord & they're (probably) not on sale anywhere, but afaic, they're Palmieri's creative, musical, and conceptual peaks. Great, great music, larger than life, but really life-sized if you got the right kind of life, if you know what I mean. Harlem River Drive, fwiw, was a bit of an anomaly for Palmieri overall. But Sentido, the album before The Sun Of Latin Music, cut for the same label, is more in that vein than most of his albums. Not exactly an answer to your question, but...

Isn't it the nature of language to become codified over time?

I believe he does.

I did not know that! The only one I've seen has had "Four Brothers", "Northwest Passage", "Apple Honey", etc. "Wildroot" & "Blowin' Up A Storm" are about as "obscure" as it gets. What's on the other one?

Jesus may or my not love you, Allen. But Stevie Wonder does!